What is our primary use case?
I started using JIRA Portfolio for development. Typically, it was useful for backtracking in the first place and later for project planning. I tried to use it to track every kind of issue.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the product stems from the fact that it is able to give an oversight of what work is in progress while having a kanban board or similar visuals that can be used in an international context with video calls and where you can get away with just a piece of paper because you are not the same site. The good thing is that you don't lose the tickets, and you can connect them in different formats. You can connect the ticket if you want to track more static information on the wiki page, and such integration helps a lot, along with the other integrations with source code tools and other products.
What needs improvement?
From an improvement perspective, I would like to see the product of more integration capabilities with different platforms. The APIs work, but what my company noticed is that Atlassian offers extensions in the marketplace, and one also needs to buy new products it provides. The integration of the new products with the rest of the portfolio always takes some time, including for users to become familiar with Atlassian Assets and OpsGenie.
The product's performance is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using JIRA Portfolio for over a decade.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of stability, if I consider the availability part, I can rate the product a nine out of ten. Our company rarely has seen an outage or an interruption in the tool's service. From the performance perspective, while on CloudFirst, it could sometimes be a little bit slower.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I haven't seen any issues with the tool's scalability.
Hundreds of people in my organization use the product. I don't have the exact license number, but for our business line, it must be a few hundred. Many people might not be using the same features offered by the product, but they all have access to wiki. For the main use case, my company has 40 users.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have worked with other solutions in the past for backtracking and for software development. I can say that JIRA Portfolio is the best tool that I have worked with till now.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase is complex. If everybody fills in their time, then resource leveling can be done, but in an agile way of working, it's quite complex to make estimates and track time if you work on a lot of different items. You don't check the time on a minute-by-minute basis.
During the product's deployment phase, it helps that you can integrate JIRA Portfolio with your CI/CD pipeline to see planned work and tickets, along with pull requests or view code drops to see what the difference in the new releases of the tool and see what are all the code changes or changes in the planned work and it also allows you to have automatic release notes. When you have daily releases, you don't want to draft everything manually, but it is still relevant to have a quick view of how all the things are linked together.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not believe that the product provides value for money since I feel that it is quite expensive. I don't have a clear view of the cost associated with the licensing part of the tool. The product considers the license cost based on the actual usage of the product. My company has a premium license, and it is huge enough to be extended to everybody in my company, including the ones who have very limited usage of it. My company likes to have the product connected to the rest of the team, though many are not daily users of the solution.
What other advice do I have?
Speaking about how the tool's road mapping or capacity planning features impacted our company's project management area, I would say that I haven't used it much. I think it could be useful to have some resource leveling across bigger teams, but I don't think it is currently used for such areas.
I think JIRA Portfolio is quite a complex tool with a lot of configuration options. You really need to have some people dedicated to seeing what is all in the box and what is needed for my business and gradually introduce them. Everyone can do something with Jira, but when you scale up, it can become messy so you need data architects and technical guys who can automate and glue the things properly to your business.
The product's integration capabilities work pretty well, especially considering that more tools are always needed in enterprise-sized businesses.
In terms of the value derived from the use of the product by our company, I can say that the integration of the tool's ticketing system with wiki and with software trackings, thereby giving a complete portfolio to users even though there are better or cheaper tools for individual things. You can have free wikis with the tool, but then they are not linked, which is good. I think the integration and also the fact that you have open APIs to connect it with other tools so that it is not a closed system. The product already has a big portfolio, but there are still many links that are valuable, and in the marketplace, it is a good tour considering all the extensions available in it from third-party products, though it may get complex to find the right solution. With some dedication, it is possible to find the right extensions for the product.
In general, I rate the product an eight out of ten.