Portfolio for JIRA

#1

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.

#2

I have used portfolio for Jira OnDemand and am significantly underwhelmed. I know others in my org like enough, but for me there is far too much overhead to make the product worth my time, let alone the commercial cost. Id rather use cards and a wall or a spreadsheet if I need to share.

#3

I tried Portfolio about a year ago, and felt similar to @ryan - way too much overhead to be useful.

#4

Atlassian released a new version in June 2016, which was completely re-written and included a much needed feature to sync with team/project backlogs, this dramatically reduced the over-head.

#5

I will try to give it another look this week.

#6

Still pretty poor for a tool and certainly far behind Agile Central (Rally) and VersionOne for portfolio / program steering. TFS has to be tweaked to support a business architecture / nesting portfolio / programs / projects but still a better solution than JIRA’s implementation.

Jonathan

#7

I still think index cards and masking tapes are the ideal solution. Honestly. It drives conversation, transparency and engagement. I understand the desire for tools to integrate, but I tend to favor an integration of the minds over the integration of tools.

#8

Completely agree with @ryan and I’ve seen a great example of a company displaying their Roadmap this way on the wall in the kitchen, as it was the place people gathered and talked the most.

Sadly I don’t have this option as working in distributed organisation.

#9

Board buddies is the only effective option I have seen work.

#10

Paul, I started using Portfolio six months ago. Primary reason was as a trial product; would it be useful to make sense of an existing Jira backlog that was in disarray? Like you, we are a distributed organisation; as the newly appointed PO it allowed me to quickly make sense of the backlog and illustrate the roadmap to business stakeholders.

The danger for me came when stakeholders took it to be a source of truth: “What does portfolio say?”. It was only ever a sandbox, because the direct synchronization wasn’t perfect and made for extra work overall. I therefore stopped using it for operational reporting during the last four months.

I have just been given a road map for several new products which was presented as blobs on a PowerPoint slide. I’m once again using portfolio–each product is an initiative and I’ll use it to inject some realism to the timelines and effort/resourcing requirements. I could use a spreadsheet, but given we have a license for the product it saves me some of the effort.

I dream of co-location and physical wallboards.