JIRA Portfolio Reviews

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.

JIRA Portfolio is one of the best tools for storage management. We use it in our data center.

The valuable features of the JIRA Portfolio are the customization it provides which is very useful and the Agile project management capability.

We are using the on-premise deployment, but it is slower and not as easy to manage as the cloud version.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for approximately seven years.

JIRA Portfolio is stable. Initially, there were hiccups, but more or less they were stabilized later. Within the initial six months, we saw that there was some performance challenges or stability problem, but I'm not seeing any stability issues at this time. It's a great tool from that perspective.

JIRA Portfolio is scalable to a large extent because for an organization like ours, we have data that is approximately 10 years old and we migrated everything to this tool and it was able to handle all that data. 

We have approximately 3,000 users using the solution.

JIRA Portfolio's initial setup has a learning curve, but once you start using the tool, it becomes simpler in the way it is managed.

We have a team of approximately 10 who handle the maintenance and support of Jira Portfolio.

The initial learning curve should be faster and there should be quick start videos because sometimes the new users become confused. When we compare feature to feature with the tool they need some training. If we have some training while we are deploying it, it will help in the long term and remove any confusion.

I rate JIRA Portfolio a ten out of ten.

JIRA Portfolio is used in our organization for scrum projects. The solution helps manage projects, plan sprints, and execute the planned sprints. The development team is the major user of JIRA Portfolio in our company. 

The solution is sometimes complex to use, especially when Confluence is used along with JIRA Portfolio. 

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for nearly 15 years. 

The solution is stable enough. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

The solution is highly scalable and flexible as well. Even without availing of add-ons from the vendor, the basic JIRA Portfolio is enough to make customizations according to the use cases or projects. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

Until now, at our company, we never had the need to seek customer support because we never faced any issues, downtime, or server porting with the solution. 

The initial setup of JIRA Portfolio is quite straightforward. I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. As it's a cloud version, the solution setup process is very fast; you just need to create an account and mostly provide access to team members.

In most cases, one professional is enough to deploy JIRA Portfolio. I have witnessed the solution being used by small, medium, and enterprise-level companies. The setup process majorly involves getting access to the JIRA cloud and the subscription. 

The solution is offered at a high cost and the price further escalates depending on the number of add-ons availed. The solution is very popular and a huge number of companies are using it, so I believe the product is not unaffordable. 

JIRA Portfolio is used to track time in our company. For reporting purposes in our organization, we use Power BI, and JIRA is integrated with Power BI for all tracking needs. 

The solution helps you organize projects and it can be complex to use, especially when Confluence is used in integration with JIRA Portfolio. How someone utilizes the flexibility of JIRA Portfolio's issues, epics and stories depends upon the individual's interpretation of the solution.

The solution is worth its price to keep you on track with projects. Whether the tool gets used in the Kanban or Scrum method depends upon the development style at Agile. JIRA Portfolio is mostly used for Scrum because there are sprints available, projects can be planned from a project management perspective, ABCs can be planned, dates can be fixed and it seems more organized than other methods. 

The solution is also used in Scrum because the management, future releases and roadmaps can be planned. There are similar project management tools. I am aware that a similar tool like JIRA Portfolio is hosted by Azure, especially for developer teams, but I would still recommend JIRA Portfolio if it seems affordable to the company or professionals. I would overall rate JIRA Portfolio a nine 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.

We sometimes use JIRA Portfolio as an agile solution. Sometimes, we use it as a kanban solution. It was all dictated by the type of work that each team does.

The solution's tracking capabilities helped ensure we had full visibility into planned work and scheduled work. As new work was identified, we could properly slot it in, schedule it, and manage it. This visibility helped us increase the confidence in delivery and launching and decreased the variance to the planned launch date.

The solution’s pricing could be reduced.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for 20 years.

I've used the solution both on-premises and cloud, and I've never had any performance issues.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

I've never had any issues with the solution's scalability or availability.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

If you do not understand the environment, the deployment will not be easy. Since I have used JIRA for quite some time and understand the Atlassian ecosystem, the initial setup of the solution was very straightforward for me.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution’s initial setup an eight out of ten.

Given the solution’s significant functionality, benefits, and value, you get more than you pay for.

I used the solution's Advanced Roadmaps feature instead of the regular roadmap feature. I liked it because it provided a visual that allowed my leadership and my partners to understand the roadmap, when we were getting work done, and when we were launching a feature or functionality.

I've mostly found solutions when I go to the community. I google JQL a lot, which is probably the extent of my interaction with a community knowledge base.

JIRA Portfolio helps facilitate cross-team collaboration in projects. In Jira, you can explicitly define a dependency between work, issues, and items within different projects. With Advanced Roadmaps, you can create initiatives and projects that facilitate cross-team collaboration in projects.

I would recommend JIRA Portfolio to other users because it provides good visibility. Jira gives you the tools to see what work you've planned and if there are any dependencies or risks that might be creating any issues.

The solution has adopted SAFe, which is a type of process management, workflow management, and software. The Advanced Roadmaps is the type of tool that helps support SAFe methodologies, which are an extension of agile project management.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

I am using JIRA Portfolio for tracking and reporting issues. We use it for the entire sprint and will have all the information there, such as testing, and all the developers.

The solution has improved our production process. We have fewer issues and everything that happens in our process is captured in the solution.

The most valuable features of the JIRA Portfolio are the ease of use, many developers are familiar with it.

The automation in JIRA Portfolio could improve, it takes some time. We have to do some other tactics to have the same integration. Manually integrating something will take more work than if it was automated, but the automation scripting in the solution is not simple.

The ability to connect to market-leading tools should be easier, such as Selenium. A smaller package installation would make it easier. One component would speed up the process. For example, if people choose Selimiam in Jira Portfolio should be one component, such as one .exe file which everything can be installed. A similar process should be done for Cypress to make the process easier.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

We have approximately 30 people using the solution. We plan to increase usage in the future.

The scalability of the JIRA Portfolio is good.

We have a team that provides us with support. However, we have used support that has helped us with a few aspects, but it has been minimal.

I have used ALM prior to Jira Portfolio. JIRA Portfolio is easier to use. When using ALM, creating tickets can be difficult.

The initial implementation of the JIRA Portfolio was simple. We use templates for the process.

We have seen an ROI using JIRA Portfolio.

The solution does not require maintenance.

My advice to others is to make the automation simple that is put into Jira Portfolio.

I rate JIRA Portfolio a nine out of ten.

I gave my rating of nine out of ten for the solution because it is easy to use and has benefits over ALM.

We use JIRA Portfolio to manage our program of work.

Since we have been using JIRA Portfolio it has improved our productivity and visibility.

The most valuable feature of JIRA Portfolio is the visuals it provides rather than Kanban boarded tickets.

I have been using JIRA Portfolio for approximately two years.

The solution is reliable.

We have approximately 50 people using the solution in my company.

We had to use assistance for the initial setup.

We used a third-party implementation to develop the solution.

I rate JIRA Portfolio a six out of ten.

JIRA Portfolio is a tool that is primarily used for software development. Our scrum teams and product owners utilize it to manage the software development process. We have an extensive internal software development process that is supported by JIRA Portfolio.

The solution is deployed on JIRA's Atlassian Cloud.

The best features of JIRA are its flexibility and configurability, allowing us to tailor it to our specific needs. Additionally, its widespread familiarity makes it easier to onboard new employees, and its associated software development tools are a major plus.

The user interface of JIRA is not very user friendly, and its configuration capabilities are limited when it comes to creating a more user-friendly experience. For example, there is no way to group fields, use bold fonts, or add colors to the interface. This is one of the main drawbacks of JIRA, as it severely limits customization options despite its general functionality.

The reporting and dashboard capabilities have room for improvement. Though there are many powerful dashboarding and reporting solutions available such as Microsoft, Qlik, and eazyBI, they may not be as flexible as desired. To maximize their utility, the ability to extract data, upload it to other tools, and use the data for reporting is desirable. Our company currently uses eazyBI as its primary reporting solution, but having the capability to upload data to other solutions using JIRA Portfolio could be advantageous.

We are working with the project portfolio and its associated reporting and KPIs. It would be helpful to have a tool that is specifically designed to track the KPIs of the portfolio. This feature should come with built-in project portfolio management processes, including KPIs, and a dashboard with preset configurations for managing the project portfolio and its KPIs. This would make it easier to work with the project portfolio and provide better visibility into its performance.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We have had issues with the speed of JIRA's Atlassian Cloud which the solution is deployed on.

We reached out to JIRA, our reseller, and our JIRA partner a few times over the years for support. One of the issues we had was with the speed of the cloud service, but this is a very rare occurrence. Most of the time we find what we need on JIRA's community chat and on Google.

Setting up the new software development process wasn't a difficult task, as there was an external company with JIRA competence in Lithuania we could hire to do the configuration. However, we had to gain more knowledge about the processes we wanted to implement on JIRA. This took some time, but after a few months of learning, members of our internal team were able to configure and develop JIRA by themselves without the help of external consultants.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We have 300 people using the solution.

We have customized JIRA to fit our needs in terms of portfolio management. JIRA is a powerful solution that will enable portfolio management activities to be done more efficiently. When portfolio management requires approval and process tasks, then JIRA is the right solution for the job. However, if the portfolio is more focused on reporting, then JIRA may not be so helpful and the user can continue using the tools they are currently using.

We use the solution to create a unified roadmap that allows us to track investments and actuals. Additionally, we need a single view that displays the work items assigned to each value stream, and we need to prioritize these items according to the WSA technique.

The most valuable feature is the dashboard where we can see all of our projects and apply filters to shortlist those projects.

The reporting has room for improvement. We were working on a project, trying to figure out what our task was and when the start and end dates were. This wasn't too difficult, as we had all the information we required, however, we had to align a lot of data in order to get the right information, which was a bit of a hassle.

The initial setup could be more user-friendly. Additionally, it's important to consider portfolio-level metrics. Having more portfolio-level metrics would be beneficial.

With Jira, an issue that arises is the length of time it takes to show certain data. If this could be sped up, the user experience would undoubtedly be improved.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We have some issues with the stability.

The solution is somewhat scalable.

Tech support can be reassuring but requires some effort to get the answers we need. We have to search through conference pages to find solutions, which may take some time, but we can purchase a service that provides ongoing support.

The initial setup is not straightforward. 

We don't take a big-bang approach. We start by deploying one piece of art and then presenting it to the leadership. They need to have an overall view of how it's progressing. If all the necessary data is available, it may not take more than two weeks to implement.

To properly implement, it was important to first tag the teams and their respective tasks and to assign them to the relevant ethics. Additionally, it was also important to set deadlines for the completion of the tasks. One of the biggest challenges is people not putting in their estimates, which hinders accurate tracking of progress.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We have one person per year using the solution.