How well is your strategy aligned with delivery?

Strategy starts at the top, but it often loses clarity as it moves down, especially in growing organizations. Teams become siloed, using different tools, processes, and priorities. Without feedback loops, leadership can’t track progress. And without visibility, it’s hard to ensure day-to-day work supports strategic goals.

When teams aren’t aligned, efforts become fragmented, leading to failed projects, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. Strategy becomes a slide deck instead of a driver of action.

Why strategy and execution often go their separate ways

Here are four common causes of disconnect:

• Scattered goals: Leadership defines strategic objectives, but they rarely translate to day-to-day work. Teams stay busy but do not always focus on the right things. Work becomes fragmented across portfolios, making it hard to measure progress or make trade-offs.
• Invisible priorities: Lack of visibility into what matters most causes teams to focus on what's urgent instead of what's strategic. Without structured prioritization, decisions are driven by noise, not data, leading to misaligned projects and misused resources.
• Siloed budget: Budgeting and execution often happen in isolation. Financial data lives in spreadsheets that few people can access. This makes it difficult to connect spending with strategic goals or to adjust when things go off track. ROI becomes an afterthought.
• Fragmented risk management: Risks are often tracked in scattered spreadsheets or informal notes, creating blind spots. Early warning signs go unnoticed without centralized oversight, and responsibility becomes unclear. Risks escalate and delivery suffers.
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Why Jira isn’t enough for strategic management

Jira excels at managing sprints, workflows, and team tasks. But it wasn’t designed to support cross-functional planning or strategic oversight at scale.

As a result, teams face predictable problems:

• Siloed planning between business leaders and delivery teams, where strategic goals are discussed at one level, but never clearly translated into execution.
• Lack of real-time visibility into dependencies, risks, and capacity across teams, which leads to bottlenecks, rework, and misaligned timelines.
• No clear line of sight from epics and features to top-level OKRs or company goals, making it difficult to measure progress or strategic impact.
• Inefficient resource allocation due to disconnected planning tools and fragmented communication between departments.
• No visibility into budget usage across initiatives, making it harder to assess whether investments are driving the intended value.

The result? Teams stay busy, but not necessarily effective. A lot of effort goes into delivering work, but without the context of strategic priorities, it’s easy to lose focus on what actually moves the organization forward.

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Solution: Upgrade Jira with Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) software

To address strategic issues, you need a strategic solution. That’s what Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) software is for. It’s a comprehensive management tool that helps businesses align their business strategy with initiatives, optimize resource allocation, manage costs, and track progress. 

Strategic Portfolio Management isn’t just for executives. It’s designed for any organization that needs to align top-level strategy with day-to-day execution. That includes portfolio managers, PMOs, enterprise architects, finance leaders, and product or program owners working across large, complex portfolios.

There are many alternatives to consider, but if you want your Jira data to be the backbone of your planning and management, your SPM app must integrate with Jira seamlessly. This will reduce friction and ensure data reliability.

Enter BigPicture Enterprise: a strategic planning extension for BigPicture that allows your business to connect the high-level objectives with granular work. As a result, your planning and execution are aligned across portfolios.

As an end-to-end solution, BigPicture Enterprise simplifies governance by unifying strategic planning, budgeting, and execution under a single configurable framework, avoiding the fragmented workflows and admin overhead of stitched-together enterprise tools.

The app is framework-agnostic, which makes it perfect for complex organizations with Waterfall, Agile, or Hybrid teams. Best of all, BigPicture Enterprise takes weeks instead of months to implement in your organization compared to other apps available on the market.

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How BigPicture Enterprise helps align your strategy with execution

A lot of businesses struggle to get all their teams on the same page. But with the right tool at your disposal, it’s doable. And you don’t need to pay for countless apps to unlock Strategy Portfolio Management in Jira.

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Connect strategic objectives with granular work

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Connecting day-to-day work with broader company goals can be a challenge, especially in large, complex organizations. BigPicture Enterprise helps bridge that gap by providing a clear view of how strategic objectives align with ongoing work.

With support for custom portfolio structures and real-time synchronization with Jira, teams can define and track OKRs in a way that reflects their unique workflows. Work items in Jira can be directly linked to objectives, making it easier to monitor progress without switching tools.

Built-in visualizations like Gantt charts offer a high-level overview of alignment and progress, while OKR health indicators help teams stay on track across departments, all within the familiar Jira environment.

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Prioritize with clarity across the organization

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Prioritizing work across multiple projects, programs, and portfolios is rarely straightforward, especially when goals shift and resources are limited. BigPicture Enterprise offers tools to bring structure and clarity to that process, right inside Jira.

Your teams can apply built-in scoring models like WSJF or RICE, or configure custom ones tailored to their specific criteria. As project data changes, priority scores update automatically, helping maintain an objective, up-to-date view of what matters most.

Priority scores can be visualized not only in the dedicated Priorities module but also across Gantt, Scope, Backlog, Board, and Risks modules – ensuring decision-makers have visibility in every context where work is planned or reviewed.

This approach makes it easier to spot high-impact initiatives, weigh short-term pressures against long-term strategy, and ensure teams are focused where they can add the most value.

By embedding prioritization into daily workflows, organizations can move toward a more consistent and transparent decision-making process, even as complexity grows.

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Stay on top of finances

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Keeping track of budgets and actuals can be difficult when financial data lives outside the tools teams use every day. BigPicture Enterprise helps close that gap by bringing financial visibility directly into Jira, where work is already being managed.

Teams can compare planned versus actual costs, identify trends, and drill down into individual programs, all without relying on external spreadsheets or manual updates. Financial data syncs automatically from Jira issues, reducing overhead and improving accuracy.

Access and permissions can be customized to match organizational needs, whether that means providing high-level portfolio views or detailed breakdowns for finance, PMOs, or delivery teams. Support for multiple currencies and role-based configurations makes it adaptable to a variety of business contexts.

By integrating financial tracking with operational workflows, BigPicture Enterprise helps eliminate the guesswork from budget oversight, giving leaders real-time visibility into how money is being spent, where value is being created, and when it’s time to course-correct.

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Switch from reactive to proactive risk management

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Managing risk effectively means more than reacting to issues as they arise. It requires visibility, context, and a consistent approach across the organization. BigPicture Enterprise brings risk management into Jira, making it part of everyday portfolio planning.

Instead of relying on static spreadsheets, teams can track and assess risks in the same space where work happens. Risks can be linked directly to initiatives, offering a clearer view of potential threats like delivery delays, resource constraints, or regulatory concerns.

Organizations can define their own risk metrics, scoring models, and impact thresholds to reflect internal methodologies. Whether you're following a formal governance framework or a more agile approach, the system adapts to how you evaluate and manage risk.

With this integrated view, teams are better positioned to anticipate and mitigate issues early, shifting from reactive problem-solving to a more strategic, resilient mindset.

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What’s next for BigPicture Enterprise?

The roadmap for BigPicture Enterprise is focused on deepening its strategic portfolio management capabilities. Expect to see continued improvements in:

• Executive-level views: combining goals, risks, budgets, and more in one place,
• Financial management improvements: Initiative baseline snapshots, CapEx, and OpEx,
• Enterprise reporting: Data visualization, customizable reports, and long-term planning views,
• Decision intelligence: AI-powered recommendations and predictive analytics.

And that’s just the beginning. More powerful features are on the way.

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Ready to bridge the gap between strategy and execution? Try BigPicture Enterprise

As organizations scale, the link between leadership and delivery often weakens. BigPicture Enterprise restores that connection by aligning high-level goals with day-to-day Jira work and surfacing data that drives strategic decisions.

With built-in OKR tracking, prioritization, budgeting, and risk management, teams can stay focused on what truly matters.

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Want to make sure you’re getting the most out of BigPicture Enterprise? Reach out to our experts for an all-encompassing implementation and training. Speed up the app's adoption and ensure it addresses your unique needs.

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