How a bank uses Advanced Portal Reports to move demand prioritization into the portal

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One of our bank customers runs a fairly standard demand intake process in Jira Service Management. Business teams submit new project requests through the portal, and those requests stay there until a Go or No Go decision is made after a pitch presentation. If a request is approved, it gets a Roadmap status and moves into Tempo Planner for scheduling.

Up to that point, the bank runs on Advanced Portal Reports' Standard Edition to keep everyone on the same page: a live report view of the request list, SLA status on every item, the fields the portal customers want to see, filtering, search, and export to Excel or CSV when someone needs to work with the data elsewhere. Business, IT, and delivery can all follow along without anyone needing a Jira license.

That covers visibility well. The part that took more thought was what happens before the decision: request prioritization.

The customer's process

The bank holds a board meeting once a month, as part of its Annual Planning Cycle, to review new requests for larger projects. Requests come in from different departments and user groups across the bank, and up to 20 of them get nominated into the same batch for a given meeting.

Before the meeting, business teams decide which of their demands they want in that batch and rank them relative to one another, from 1 to 20, in a field called Business Demand Priority. Each number can only be used once, no ties.

During the meeting, demand managers walk through those same requests with the board, and once the board reaches a decision, they record the final order in a second field, Delivery Order, also 1 to 20 with no repeats.

The two fields stay separate on purpose. Business Demand Priority is what the business asked for. Delivery Order is what the board actually approved. Keeping both means the original request isn't lost just because the board reordered it.

Where the manual work was

None of this prioritization logic is unusual, and the bank wasn't doing anything wrong by ranking demands this way. What took extra effort was getting those rankings into Jira.

Without an editable field on the portal, capturing the business's ranking ahead of the meeting typically meant a spreadsheet, listing the batch of up to 20 demands with a column for preferred order, passed around by email so everyone could see the same numbers before walking into the room. The board's decision during the meeting usually got captured the same way, in notes or a follow-up email, and then someone, a demand manager or an admin with Jira access, went through and updated the field on each of the up to 20 tickets individually, one at a time, after the fact.

The decision itself was never the bottleneck. It's that everything happened outside Jira first, and Jira only caught up afterward, sometimes a day or two later.

What changed with Advanced Edition

With Advanced Portal Reports' Advanced Edition, Business Demand Priority and Delivery Order are exposed as editable fields directly in the portal report, so the business and the demand managers are working from the same live list instead of a spreadsheet copy of it.

Before the meeting, business users open that report, see the full batch of nominated demands together, and set their number for each one, 1 to 20, no repeats, right there. During the meeting, demand managers do the same for Delivery Order as the board reaches its decisions, working off the identical list the business already ranked.

Everyone works from the same report, so there's no separate version to reconcile. Every edit writes back to Jira the moment it's made, and it's logged with the exact value, who changed it, and when.

Why it works

The process itself didn’t really change. Business teams still decide what they want to prioritize, and the board still makes the final call.

What changed is how they get those decisions into Jira.

Business Demand Priority shows what the business wants, while Delivery Order shows what the board decided. Both are in the same portal report, so everyone is working from the same list and Jira stays up to date.

For the bank, this means less back and forth, fewer manual updates, and no need to move the process to spreadsheets or another system just to get the priorities into Jira. Whoever needs to make the decision can do it directly in the portal, without a Jira license.

Advanced Portal Reports is available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

[Vanessa Mouriz]

Thanks for sharing! :)