Jile - Key Concepts and Terminologies

To understand and work with Jile, here are few terminologies that can help you get started. Jile is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS).
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1) Admin - When someone successfully registers for a subscription in Jile through Jile official website a domain gets created in Jile. Every domain’s data is managed in isolation, which provides complete data segregation to different Jile customers. The user who subscribes to Jile, becomes a domain admin who can further extend the role to other users. Admins can manage some global settings such as allowed email domains of all users, currency, additional domain admins etc. A domain can have one or multiple workspaces each independently managing a set of product or solution development activities. Different workspaces are ideal when there is almost no overlapping concern with another workspace in terms of people, processes and artifacts.

2) Workspace - Typically, Portfolios, Value Streams, Business Units are common candidates to be treated as independent workspaces. Jile provides the flexibility to use the preferred terms for their workspaces. Workspace configurations are managed by the respective workspace admins.

3) Workarea - Jile allows the workspace admin to create arbitrary hierarchies in terms of work areas and teams within them. All workareas under the same workspace share the same set of configurations. In a simple hierarchy, a workspace would contain a set of workareas each having one or more teams. Multiple workareas are ideal where the product or solution development activities represented by them deserve a good level of autonomy, but they are not completely unrelated or independent. A workarea can oversee the activities in the downstream workareas through data aggregation.

4) Workarea Types - Based on an organization’s own topology they commonly refer a workarea as Program, Product, Agile Release Train (ART) or something else. Jile provides the flexibility to use the preferred terms for their work area types.

5) A workarea typically aligns a set of teams or a set of downstream workareas to a common mission. As alignment and autonomy fuel each other, enterprises should strive for organizing the workareas around value and ensure sufficient alignment among all its stakeholders.

6) Agile Team - An agile team is a small group of people with diverse skills who define, build, test and deliver incremental value. Teams are the execution engines of a workarea. Jile supports both Scrum and Kanban teams. Based on the team type, Jile offers some variations in the activities and artifacts supported by the team. A good example can be a set of engineering teams following Scrum and a support team following Kanban.

7) Agile Roles - In addition to the teams, there are some key members who help ensure successful functioning of the workarea. For example, Business Owner, System Architect, Product Manager and many more. A typical Jile user is either a member of specific team or can be a key member of a workarea or can sometimes be both.

8) Users - A Jile user who is only a team member of a team, will find himself in a team level homepage by default after he logs in to Jile. On the other hand, a workarea key member will land on the workarea level homepage after login. Work area and team levels offer different sets of menus. If an user is member of multiple workareas or teams, he can view and navigate from one level to another using the workspace navigator.

9) OMNICHANNEL Workarea - OMNICHANNEL Workarea which is powered by 5 teams is part of the DIGITAL workspace. Apart from OMNICHANNEL there are 5 more Workareas under DIGITAL Workspace. Team Members have implicit navigation and READ access to the parent workarea. Hence, a member of AVENGERS can always navigate to the OMNICHANNEL program. This encourages Systems Thinking.

10) Configurable menu - Jile has a configurable menu. Each menu is an entry point of a group of related activities. Using CONFIGURE MENU action menu items can be added, removed, renamed or rearranged.

11) App Group - Menus can be organized as groups where every menu item is essentially an APP and a group is known as APP GROUP. Based on the workspace settings, some menu items are available out of the box whereas additional items can be added from an app catalogue accessible through the PLUS APP action.

12) FUNCTIONS can be organized into groups. Based on the workspace settings, some FUNCTIONS are available out of the box whereas additional ones can be added from a FUNCTION BROWSER accessible through the PLUS FUNCTION action. After clicking APP Group, the App Browser appears with different applications for that user.

13) In the Function Browser, functions are organized by categories. Already added functions are check-marked.

In this video we have seen few Jile terminologies and underlying concepts.