I have followed and used Portfolio for JIRA (and as it was originally known Roadmaps for JIRA) in two companies now and found it useful, but sometimes difficult to get POs and stakeholders using it.
Has anyone else looked at this add-on for JIRA and is actively using it?
My experience so far:
I found it’s a great product and really pushes stakeholders and teams to follow good practices to get the maximum benefit. The key point is estimates, the ‘plan’ becomes useless without the product backlog items being estimated, it’s almost dangerous to leave something un-estimated as it’s absent from the plan.
Also on the positive side, it provides a clear view of what’s happening across one or more teams and gives stakeholders ‘no escape’ from the truth. One of the best features is adding releases to the plan and seeing how feasible these are. Stakeholders and POs then have the opportunity to re-organise the plan in a sandbox environment, before committing changes to team backlogs.
On the downside I have found it difficult (especially version 1) to get POs and stakeholders to maintain the plan, and they just want to revert back to their try and trusted spreadsheets.