JIRA Portfolio Reviews

We use JIRA Portfolio to implement the scaled agile methodology and conduct retrospectives. It's also used by us for writing bugs and managing our daily structure.

The workflows are the most valuable feature of the solution, whether for tasks, bugs, or chain requests from the site. I also like the solution's GUI, which is easy to navigate for everyone.

I think the solution can improve in graphs and the analysis part.

Considering what I would like to see in the solution that could simplify my life, I would like to mention Miro. Currently, we have to visit Miro specifically to carry out PI planning.

I use the cloud version of JIRA daily for the standards and traceability of defects coming from a point. I am unsure whether I am using JIRA Align or JIRA Portfolio. However, I think it is JIRA Portfolio because it has everything developed adequately for dev track, dev caller, and dev dash. Also, it has everything JIRA provides.
I think I have been using JIRA for three years. Also, I'm not sure about the version of JIRA that we are using in our organization. Since I work for a very big company in the Netherlands, the company manages all the tooling-related matters. So, only the testers and developers have access to the version information.
I am a customer of JIRA Platform.

The integration platform for the tooling now available is very easy to use, requiring no expertise in computer science engineering or any such related fields. Simply select the desired options from the provider's interface and use the tool without the need for explicit configuration. For these reasons, I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for software development management. It includes the timeline and the requirement definition.

As a project management team, we’re supposed to manage the teams that develop different products. It can be hectic if we don't have a tool. With JIRA, it's very easy and seamless. All the teams can give their updates, check on their backlogs, and work on them.

The ability to move across various stages from solution discovery to completion is valuable. We can assign specific tasks to users. We can also see the timeline and the progress of the projects. It makes our work easy and efficient. The tool helps us achieve more within the stipulated timeline and budget.

JIRA and Confluence must be linked automatically. What I change on JIRA must be updated in Confluence if it is related. If a task has been completed in JIRA and is mentioned somewhere in Confluence, the status must also be updated on Confluence.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

The product is scalable. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Approximately 50 people are using the tool in our organization. We are planning to increase the usage in the future.

I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten.

I rate the pricing a six out of ten on a scale where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Before using the solution, we were working manually. I would recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use JIRA Portfolio for program management for agile team development across multiple product pipelines.

Version management is the most valuable feature of JIRA Portfolio.

JIRA Portfolio's configuration management could be improved.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for at least five years.

JIRA Portfolio is a cloud-based solution, and I haven't had a problem with it. I rate JIRA Portfolio ten out of ten for stability.

JIRA Portfolio is a scalable solution. I rate JIRA Portfolio a seven out of ten for scalability.

JIRA Portfolio's initial setup is not intuitive and needs to be customized. I rate the solution a five out of ten for ease of initial setup.

I rate JIRA Portfolio a five out of ten for its pricing.

JIRA Portfolio is deployed on the cloud in our organization. My advice to people looking into using JIRA Portfolio is that it's absolutely fine if they want to use it as a standard deployment. However, the more they want to change anything, its complexity increases quickly.

Overall, I rate JIRA Portfolio a seven out of ten.

I use the solution in cases when I need to report something such as escalating a scale. 

The solution includes good and fast notifications for other project team members. 

The solution's look and feel could be a bit more intuitive and user friendly. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The stability is rated an eight out of ten. 

The scalability is rated a seven out of ten. 

The technical support is good so is rated a nine out of ten. 

Positive

It is important to learn about the solution's functionalities and features to prepare for use. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for tracking stories or issues. Developers create tickets, and project managers track everything using Jira.

We can track the open stories or open issues that are there. That's the most valuable feature that I find.

The solution is stable and reliable.

It's scalable and allows for various configurations. 

I don't have much exposure to it. We use the tool to a minimum amount.

The integration needs to be done with different tools. In terms of email functionality, if we have an email, it would be helpful to provide the status updates or notes directly configured via email. 

I've used the solution for a couple of years. 

It's a stable solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

It is scalable. It's used with multiple tools as well, so we can do various configurations if we need to.

The developers use it. We have about 2,000 or more users that use it within the company.

I've never dealt with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

The initial setup was handled by somebody else. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the process was. 

I'm not sure how many people are maintaining the product.

I don't deal with the pricing or licensing aspects of the solution. 

This is a good solution overall. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Advanced Roadmaps is part of Jira's premium cloud subscription, so it's bundled with the product on the cloud. They've recently included it with Data Center and they've sunsetted the server product. As of today, you couldn't go out and just run the self-hosted product with a server license. They stopped sales of those and support for those.

Jira's got a family of three products. Jira software, which is used by mostly engineering team teams or software development teams. Then they have a help desk solution called Jira Service Management, which is used primarily by IT support folks. They can take in requests. Now, with the advent of Enterprise Service Management, you're seeing more help-type projects for folks. And then Work Management, the last of the three. Usually, most business teams work out of that. You might have marketing teams as well. They don't need all the software features. As a part of the premium package, you get a planning environment, which enables you to plan across projects, not just at the project level in what was formally called Portfolio for Jira. That's now called Advanced Roadmaps. They rebranded it a year or two ago to Advanced Roadmaps. It used to be sold separately. You'd get it as a separate cost and you would install it. It's plug-and-play. It would work on top of everything you already had. Since it was their own product, Atlassian decided to bundle it with the premium tier rather than having every tier including it.

Mostly there are two kinds of thought processes. A lot of people are still transitioning from waterfall. They really want the kind of Gantt chart view of the data. That's what's referred to as the roadmap in Advanced Roadmaps.

The other thing that's popular and implemented is the dependencies. Having an option to view dependencies between projects and teams is great. You might have to work to resolve those, remove those kinds of dependencies, or just be aware of them that they exist and coordinate the work between teams. Those two features are the main things. They like the Gantt chart views and also like seeing the dependencies on the dependency port and being able to forge those relationships in that environment too.

It's hard for people to learn. It's got kind of a steep learning curve.

As much as it's not Excel, I would like to see an auto-scheduling feature. It'll help you plan, yet it won't plan for you. Some people think of it as an easy button they'll hit. They have this feature already, auto-schedule. And if you understand it, you know what to do before you auto-schedule the work. If you've manually set a due date on something, it's going to respect that. It's not going to try and override it when it auto-schedules it. However, what I thought would be pretty cool is if there was the ability with these planning environments that one could introduce their own scheduling algorithm. If you carry that one step further, if it comes pre-configured with these relationships and how the auto-schedule will run, that would be ideal.

I’d like to have an algorithm or a way to introduce our own scheduling algorithm. Whether that is just a GUI for that that allows you to say, "Hey. Let's prioritize based on certain criteria," or something else, that would be ideal. There needs to be some more flexibility in the scheduling.

All of the data lives inside the tool. So maybe it could use some more integration or export options to formats that are common, like Excel or PDF or something.

However, I've run into a lot of research where people handle complex multi-level projects. That's a whole different subject matter domain. A lot of people look at is the best algorithm to auto-schedule work or predict where they may end or start based on those type types of formulas. The other thing that I liked yet went away is the resource management piece. It'd be great for a planning tool to look at the individual level, not just the team level, at the individual's skillset for planning purposes. Hopefully, we would have more data points. Their availability, capacity, for example, what days they'd be available to work, et cetera, could be tracked. This is something that they started with. They had this concept and then Atlassian said it wasn't getting much use, so they decided to pull it from the product.

I've been using Jira products since about 2008. It’s been 15 years now.

If you go with the self-hosted option on Data Center, you still have all the support. If there are bugs encountered, sometimes that can be a long time before those are resolved. However, you get the latest features and updates in the cloud automatically. Any bug fix that they identify is immediately addressed.

The scalability is great. Atlassian hosts from ten to 10,000 users in a cloud. If you go with the self-hosted on-premises, their products are also designed to scale. They've tested up to hundreds of thousands of users.

It is somewhat underused right now. I don't see a lot of plans in there or people that aren't using it. It's more based on the organization's maturity and our own maturity and if they will find a use for it. If they're just starting out and it's a small team, typically, you won't see any use. However, as the company begins to grow, and they start realizing that, "Oh. This would be good to do a process teams,” then you'd see more of a use case for it. However, for the smaller companies, it's definitely underused. Larger companies are starting to poke around in it since they realize the value it would have.

Mostly since they are built and maintained by Atlassian, there's seldom a moment when you encounter an issue. Mostly it's a suggestion or a feature request that gets reported as a bug, yet it's not. It's actually something that somebody wants to work in a different way. Overall in both cases, it's well supported.

Customer service is very good. Sometimes what people complain about is the lack of consistent representation. Anytime you call in, you're going to get somebody new. However, they're generally very responsive.

They do have a tendency to deflect a little bit. For example, they will ensure they don't fully engage with you unless the ball is truly in their court. They're not going to show you how to use the product or things like that. They'll tend to send you a knowledge article.

If you are genuinely stuck, for example, you encounter an issue or something like that, they're responsive and get on top of those things right away.

The support is friendly. If you're having an existing problem, you won't necessarily have the same representatives with all the context and everything.

The clients have a couple of products that are usually installed, sometimes even side by side with Portfolio for Jira, for example, BigPicture. That is an add-on. Still, it's not made or maintained by Atlassian. That's a third-party vendor. However, they built it on top of the code, the same tool. The structure is another third-party marketplace app.

Jira Align is also owned and maintained by Atlassian. However, it is a separate product and you do have to have the right fit for it. It's a purpose-built, agile-at-sale solution. It's not something that they market to smaller organizations or teams.

The initial setup is complex, as much as they've made a lot of strides to improve that. They've removed some of the complexity by taking certain features away from it. It kind of runs to help you set up your initial plans. However, to get the maximum value from it, you need training, and you need to be experienced in its use and understand how that algorithm works, which isn't really taught or known. You just kind of learn through experience. There is that learning curve, and it's very steep.

In terms of the deployment, it comes installed out of the box. If you get any of the cloud subscription premium tier, it's already pre-installed. That's true also with the newer versions of Data Center. If you've been using the products for some time, you would've had to install them from the old marketplace app. That wasn't so bad. It’s plug-and-play. It's already been tested and it's compatible with the system. There are just some manual steps you would need to go through to install it if you're using an earlier version.

It's built and maintained by Atlassian. It's very stable. It complies with all of their SLAs and support that they offer when it's the Atlassian-hosted subscription.

Clients implement it themselves. It's part of the core product. It's extending it. You can start a free trial and spin up a new one. You can try out the premium version for free for a couple of weeks. That's something that any user would be able to do. However, when we get involved as a consultant, it is usually when we have to go in align things. Maybe they didn't understand it and started making changes to the system and need somebody to help them and guide them through it. That said, generally speaking, a customer wouldn't need to get somebody to do the integration for it.

In terms of ROI, getting to it is usually pretty quick, unlike ServiceNow, which is usually a long time to set up and configure. Often you have to engage a consultant. With these tools, especially the SaaS version, you just quickly get going. You don't even have to give a credit card. You sign up, and you have a site that's up and running. And that's across the different family of products, even their service desk is positioned that way. One of the advantages they claim is it's so easy to get up and running, as opposed to some of their competing tools out there that require a lot of configuration on the backend or what have you.

They have a subscription model. If you're on the premium tier, that includes Advanced Roadmaps. This is similar for Data Center, which is self-hosted. A lot of companies will use the infrastructure as a service, AWS, or Azure to host the products in the cloud.

The licensing is very transparent. You can go to the Atlassian pricing calculator. You could get, depending on the number of users and the products and the tiers, the premium tier that has this feature set, and you can get a quote directly.

There are no hidden fees or extra charges. They're very transparent about their pricing. It's supposed to be very competitive with something like ServiceNow. ServiceNow would be ten times as much the cost per user annually as opposed to an Atlassian Jira product.

There may be some additional costs. Somebody needs to configure this and maintain it. Oftentimes you'll see a dedicated resource or resource responsibilities with a team within the organization to build those projects and help people plan. Otherwise, that's outsourced to consultancies like my own company. They have infrastructure costs also if you decide to host it yourself, either on-prem or in the cloud. AWS costs would not be included. You would have to pay for the hosting servers and the technical know-how and resources to manage them there. That would be the only additional cost.

You can also buy a premium support package. It's incentivized with shorter timeframes on getting back to you and getting resolutions. For larger companies, they have a technical account management program. You could purchase time with an Atlassian resource to strategize around your deployment in the ecosystem. You could get that inside scoop or whatever from Atlassian on your product roadmap and how to best get value from it.

We are integrators, partners, and resellers.

If an organization doesn't meet the minimum footprint for a product like Jira Align, which would be they would have to have a mature scrum or agile practice across, I'd say, a minimum of five teams, yet they're still looking to scale agile beyond the team level in Jira, we'll suggest Advanced Roadmaps, which was formerly called Portfolio for Jira.

That gives the company an option to work in between Jira and something as big as Jira Align and begin to prepare to scale agile so they can get those teams orchestrated through planning and events and long-term planning, and start adopting agile ceremonies and so on by using just Jira with the Advanced Roadmaps feature.

The most important thing for Portfolio is to learn how the product is intended to work and take a considered approach. Users need to be mindful of how they will plan across teams and the taxonomy or vocabulary that will be used within your organization. Those types of things will help with the configuration and change management aspects, which are also so foreign. Someone needs to take credit for everything and must be prepared to guide teams in their use for a while. There may be skeptics too around the new tools. Therefore, it's sometimes helpful to share use cases and studies from other companies in your industry. Change management aspects are part of any new tool, which is why I would say that they should have a strategy for their change management and also have a strategy or considered approach for how they're going to implement them so that everybody's on the same page.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use this program as backlog management using Kanban and Scrum and also to model service tickets.

The solution has improved our organization by allowing us to create our own customization. We can track the live status of all the flows on one page and get a single view of our progress. Also, it gives us a quality overview. 

The workflow configurations, Screen filed mapping and confluence integration of this solution are what I value most. Definitely there are multiple features to support this. 

I would say that there's a lot of reporting on the dashboard so something that can be improved is the project level visibility because it is a little unclear. Especially when you compare it to JIRA Central.

I've been using this solution for around five years now on a private cloud. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability of this program is good but it can be improved on the Administration side. 

I would say their support center is good and I would rate it a 3.5 out of 5. Every product has some pluses or minuses. So it takes a little time for things to get fixed and we always submit feedback and ask for improvements. Every product has its own backlog where we submit our request so that it gets prioritized properly. They build the product requirements based on the number of requests coming from a different client so I understand that sometimes it gets delayed.  

We currently use three solutions simultaneously, namely JIRA, Rally, and Octane. 

The initial setup was straightforward, but it is evolving towards complex now because there are many flows and many different projects. Reporting has to be done across all these projects. We use different tools for deployment.

Yes.

JIRA is a very flexible solution, so if you are a mid or small-sized team, it is very useful for the team. When you have a higher scale of work, I would say the portfolio management and the reporting need to improve. You either have to build your own solution on the APIs or you have to manage how you can configure in the current flows. My rating out of ten will be seven or eight.

In the next version, I would like to see better reporting and safer plugins, as well as easier scalability.

We are using JIRA Portfolio for business estimates and you can attract your product in a very well manner.

The most valuable feature of the JIRA Portfolio is the many features it provides, such as code integration, documentation, roadmap, and Eclipse. The solution is useful for product managers.

JIRA Portfolio could improve new implementation because if I want integration for the complete wide frame tools it cannot provide any wide frame tools.

In a future release of JIRA Portfolio, they should add more general features to make it easier for project management.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for approximately eight years.

JIRA Portfolio is a stable solution because it is on the cloud and it is one of the main reasons we chose it.

The scalability of the JIRA Portfolio is good. If you want to add more users you will only need to purchase the ability to have more users.

We have approximately 50 people using its solution in my organization. The users consist of managers, field workers, operational managers, and other teams. Everyone from junior to senior level is using it.

I have not needed to use the support.

The initial setup of the JIRA Portfolio is in the medium range of difficulty. We needed some training to be provided to our teammates. However, after the training, we were more capable. Without the training, we could not access very much or assign any product.

The setup of the JIRA Portfolio is continuous, it has taken us eight years.

We have a license to use JIRA Portfolio, we are not using the free version.

We needed complete visualization for our product which JIRA Portfolio was very capable of. As a product tracking tool, it was very good.

Whether or not this solution will be a benefit to your project depends on a lot of factors, such as your requirement.

I rate JIRA Portfolio a nine out of ten.