What needs improvement with Jira Align?

The platform's communication features could be more robust for better team integration.

The vendor should implement automation features in Jira Align. The solution should allow simple integrations with other applications like Microsoft Office.

The product should improve its communication. My English proficiency is not high, but writing in English is another skill that you need. Maybe AI can help here. Because I can see in some other applications, they have AI helpers. So when you write something and you want to do something, it can help. For example, Google Cloud Platform has it. They have a helpdesk for it. When you want to create a cluster, it can help you.

Jira Align's cost needs improvement.

One feature that needs improvement is the tool's ability to change schedules automatically. Users can't simply drag and drop tasks to reschedule them without notifying the entire team. This lack of functionality can hinder project management control, as changes should be communicated transparently to all team members. The solution cannot currently alert users when changes occur, which I believe is a function that it should provide. I hope that Jira Align will introduce AI functions to address this issue in the future. We hope to utilize it further to establish connections between the development, production, and sales marketing teams for better alignment. There seems to be a gap between product design and final mass-volume production, possibly due to cost constraints or missing models. It should also improve the support.

The product needs to improve its configurations.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

For future releases of Jira Align, I would suggest making workflows simpler and more user-friendly. It would be helpful to have improved tools for visualizing workloads and an easier way for users to collaborate with administrators to streamline complex workflows. Simplifying communication and customization, especially for managing bulk storage and intricate projects, would enhance the overall user experience.

The initial setup was a little bit complex. It involved many things.

Jira Align should reduce the many information fields we need to provide while closing defects. Jira Align should improve the ease of use for developers.

An area of room for improvement is related to Jira Align's simplicity. Someone who is new to Jira or doesn't have many years of working experience in Jira Align gets easily lost because everything looks the same in the product. The navigational and other workflow features in Jira Align aim to provide ease of use that sometimes creates difficulty for a newcomer or someone new to Jira to get to know where they are once they are in the system. In Jira Align, the navigational feature or the ability to cross over to each screen should be made more precise, and then it would be much more helpful for someone new to Jira.

The tool's corporate pricing is expensive. Continuous planning is non-supported. Only the quarterly "PI Planning" model is available for many of the most useful road mapping features. Dependency management is like throwing work over a wall from one team to another and does not help with engineering-level orchestration of work in delivery.

The solution needs to improve its pricing. It also needs to provide an integrated view of how other tasks are to be tracked. It would be also useful to see the integration of Confluence, Teams, and Slack into the product. I want to be able to communicate directly with others while using the product. I am also not sure if the integration of third-party alternate workflow tools like SAP would be possible.

My company is in the process of moving out from Jira Align. We are planning to transition to another tool called Planisware. Though there are no issues with Jira Align, Planisware offers its users a complete package in terms of portfolio management. Jira Align fails to provide its users with a complete package in terms of portfolio management. In short, Planisware offers many different facilities making it a more comprehensive tool. In a company, we can use Planisware for resource management, especially at a portfolio level. Though it is expensive in terms of licensing, our company has decided to move to Planisware.

We have experienced errors with the internal server that occurs frequently.

I am really focused on identity access management and getting access to the vendors. Right now, I'm setting up vendor access through Azure. You can do that or with the IAM. Sometimes we have to create several different types of access because we have vaulted databases. We have the Unix databases, I have MySQL, and we have Mongo, where I get access to those user classes or to the databases in the host group. Those are all different access scenario forms that I submit after I do the configuration in the form with the security team. I need clarity on the IAM. I'm not clear on PAM eighter. Is there a form that they have to submit to get access to the internal cyber-risk teams to get their access for people to be able to use the tool on the Confluence side? Do they have to send some kind of form to the operation's security or enterprise security? To be able to get the access for privileged access, do they need to be working on projects that have vaulted databases? I still need to figure out how that works. Other companies that are competitors of Jira and Confluence, are able to create their active directories for the vendors that don't come in internally. They only do access through the cloud and through third-party, two-factor identification. That's something I was wondering if that was already implemented in the packages, the package for Confluence. It would be nice to have that right in the solution.

Jira Align's setup process could be more straightforward, and they could make training and educational documentation more accessible. In the next release, I would like to see an improvement to the navigation system.

Maybe some of the terms and the connectivity could be improved. Jira Align in Jira, they share common fields in order to be aligned. These could be improved. Sometimes alignments are missing or they just disappear and we have to reestablish them.

There are fewer customization options in Jira Align due to how it was designed. For example, in Jira, you can combine stories and you can create an epic. However, in Jira Align, they combine the stories and call them features you can combine features and call them capabilities. You can combine capabilities and call it epic. It's structured differently from Jira. You just cannot buy Jira Align and just started using it. You can, however, the most beneficial thing comes when you start using Jira, and then integrate it with Jira Align, and bring in all the work done together as the actual work is done in Jira, and Jira Align is just a representation of that work. It's the naming convention that everyone is struggling with. Jira is more widely used and has a bigger customer base. They shouldn't change the terminology if people need to use Jira in order to get the most out of Align and then have the two different naming designs. It's very confusing. The UI needs work. We are part of the pilot team who are testing the new UI. Jira Align is trying to change the UI so that it is just like Jira. We didn't like it as the UI makes the functionality kind of change. If you have never used Jira Align and you are a brand new customer who used Jira, the sales pitch would go better. There are lots and lots of reports and it's very hard to understand exactly how we can use all of them. It's quite dense. They need more documentation.

The framework could be better.

Jira Align can improve the visibility of executive teams.

I have not had any issues with Jira Align.

One aspect that could be improved is that a ticket is declared as completed only when it is in the last column of the Jira board, regardless of the state it's in so that completed tickets don't get picked up because it goes by column rather than status. It's an annoying feature of Jira which they could improve. They could also add additional reporting capabilities. If I want to look at a graph of the performance and progress of a particular developer, I can't do that. GitHub gives a lot of good statistics on developer activity, productivity, and I'm not getting it here. It would be a useful thing to have. Another feature I would love to have is an inline ticket creation from the board. Right now, I have to move to backlog, create ticket and then come back.

One of the biggest issues I found in the new version was once we clicked on one of the tasks that were specifically for our group and went to look at the other portfolios in other areas we had to browse all the way back to the beginning. If you click the back button, it would not work, it stayed the same place. Additionally, if you click on page B, but then you wanted to go back to page A it would not go back to page A. You would have to browse back to the portfolio and then find your group again and open it. This was the only issue that I had with it and I am not sure if it is a Jira issue or it was because of the way the site was laid out.

There is no linkage between the Jira records and the overarching schedule. We maintain the overarching schedule in Microsoft Project, and there is no linkage back and forth with the Jira tasks. They are independent of each other.

The workflows are scalable from portfolio to individual level but can sometimes be complex to navigate.

It integrates easily with the rest of the Atlassian suite, but I am pretty sure it doesn't integrate with other tools like Slack.