JIRA Portfolio Reviews

We are using JIRA Portfolio life cycle management.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise. However, most clients choose cloud deployment. Not all of our clients have their own database.

The most valuable feature of the JIRA Portfolio is for managing teams of 10 or more. It can track the program level and portfolio. There are plenty of beneficial features, such as the hierarchy-level view, customization, and structure plugin. 

The interface JIRA Portfolio could improve.

I have used JIRA Portfolio within the last 12 months.

I have not faced any challenges with the stability of the solution.

I rate the stability of the JIRA Portfolio a six out of ten.

The scalability should improve in JIRA Portfolio.

I rate the scalability of JIRA Portfolio a seven out of ten.

Sometimes there are difficulties receiving support from the vendor. They do not answer immediately.

I rate the support from JIRA Portfolio five out of ten.

Neutral

The setup of the cloud deployment is simple. The solution has over 2,000 plugins and research is needed to determine which one is the best to use and implement.

The cloud deployment takes a few clicks from the mouse to finish. It can be done quickly.

The solution should be overall more user-friendly.

There are free plugins available, but most of them are at an additional cost. Additionally, other services are an extra cost.

This is a great tool for life cycle management.

I rate JIRA Portfolio an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

I mainly use Portfolio for integrating systems, such as web pages for different brands. We also use it for loyalty and analytics applications.

Portfolio helps us increase the visibility of projects' status and management with remote workers who make up most of the company.

Portfolio's best features are performance and elastic memory.

An improvement would be if Portfolio were integrated with Office 365. Also, Portfolio's portfolio management is complicated because you need different components or apps to see specific portfolios. 

I've been using Portfolio for three years.

Portfolio's stability is good.

Portfolio is scalable for some things, but it's more difficult if you need to scale a whole company in other levels.

JIRA's technical support is very good - when I have a question or a problem, they give us the solution immediately.

Neutral

The initial setup was easy, and deployment took a couple of months.

We used an in-house team.

Portfolio is well-priced - a license for ten users costs $100 or $150 a month. There are no additional fees to pay.

Portfolio is user-friendly, and the escalation in the organization is faster and better. I would rate it as ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for project management, especially when we have agile projects. My company has used the tool for planning, tracking, and action.

I have had little exposure to the tool, so I cannot speak about what needs improvement. I have used the product on a very minimal basis.

As there are no perfect solutions and considering that I rate JIRA Portfolio's stability an eight out of ten, I feel it is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

I have experience with JIRA Portfolio. I have not used it very actively. I use the tool on and off.

Based on my limited exposure to the product, I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. I haven't faced any problems with the product's stability.

It is a good scalable solution that I have used for small projects and reasonably large projects.

In my organization, there are teams consisting of 15 to 20 members who use the product.

I have not used any other solutions in the past for purposes similar to what I currently use JIRA Portfolio for in my company.

The product's initial setup phase was pretty okay, so it was not too bad.

In terms of the product's ability to improve the productivity of teams in our company, I would say that we have found it useful when we have to deal with projects, specifically agile projects, where it served to be very useful because it was directly applicable for planning and tracking.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it since it is a useful solution. For my company's work, the solution had all the features we wanted, which is why we were happy with it.

The benefits associated with the use of JIRA Portfolio revolves around the fact that it is a good project management tool for our company, as it was helpful in managing our project activities.

I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I just use JIRA Portfolio, which is available on the server.

When I develop software, there are many things and we need to check the status. Then, I use JIRA Portfolio in all areas, such as JIRA's use for tracking software issues from QAT. When we needed to check the plan of our project and manage the project status, I usually used JIRA. And if there is some field issue or customer service field issue, we gather the field issues using JIRA.

I think the solution's most important and valuable feature is its ability to track the issues. We can also check the status using JIRA, which is a good function in the solution.

Our major team does not control or manage JIRA server well since sometimes there is trouble using the solution, which is a problem. The solution's speed needs to be improved.

In the future, adding certain functions should be made easier in JIRA.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for around ten years. I am a software developer who uses the solution. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. It is a very scalable solution. Around 2,000 people are using the solution. In my lab, 10,000 people are using the solution.

In the future, we may change to an ARM system.

I haven't contacted customer support yet. For doubts, I talk with my infrastructure team. I think JIRA's tech support is good. I rate the solution's technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Previously, I didn't use a different system. I just opted for Jira.

The initial setup is easy. I rate it a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup, and ten is an easy setup.

I can't comment on the time taken for deployment since I don't manage JIRA server.

Maybe there are some people who manage the server using JIRA application. I guess three people are managing the solution.

A set of people were involved in the deployment of the solution.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing an eight. There is an additional cost to be paid for some kinds of tools.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.