Any best practices for project portfolio management in Jira?

[Vinayak Wagh]

A strategy that has worked well for our team has been to keep a consistent project hierarchy and standardize workflows across projects. It makes portfolio reporting and cross-project visibility a lot easier.

We use Celoxis alongside our project management processes, as it gives a good view of resource planning, portfolio health, and executive reporting all in one place. But each team is different, so I think the right configuration depends on your organization and how complicated your portfolio is.

Reporting has also become much more useful for stakeholders by focusing dashboards on key KPIs, rather than trying to track everything.

I would like to hear what has worked best for your team in terms of best practices or experience. Any thoughts?

[Ahmet Kilic - T2T · Accepted solution]

@Vinayak Wagh from my experience, what holds for any scale is this: start with the method, not the tool. Once the method is clear, the configuration almost writes itself. Standardizing workflows and processes has gold value therefore :)

When it comes to tools, Celoxis looks good, but back-and-forth is a concentration killer.

I can well imagine o achieve any Infos Celoxis shows up. Here is high level best practise how you can imagine:

Platform for Portfolio level (on top)

Goals -> set up your strategy
Project -> set up your project for business stakeholder and connect Jira

Jira Workspace for Project/Initiatives in your Portfolio

• this connects to Platform Projects

Jira Workspace for Delivery

• this connects to Project/Initiatives in your Portfolio appropriately
• this might connect to Platform Projects (depending on use-case)

Jira Plan (if not sufficient BigPicture App)

Breakdown from strategy to execution through View
View for Portfolio Team
View for Project Team
Track Portfolio Status
Track Project Status

Reporting

Native Jira Workspace Reporting and Jira Plans and Platform Dashboards
If not sufficient, Rich Filters
If not sufficient, EasyBI
If not sufficient, Atlassan Analytics
If not sufficient, 3rd party BI Tools

Happy to go deeper if you share how many teams and projects you are running, and who consumes the reports.
Don't hesitate to reach out to ahmet.kilic@teams2tech.com

[Tomislav Tobijas · Accepted solution]

I agree - standardizing workflows and processes across the organization makes your life much easier (either from a technical or a business perspective).

We've implemented a couple of projects where Jira Plans is the key element for main stakeholders to monitor and manage their projects or buckets of work. We also use this internally, and so far, everyone really likes it 🙂

As for monitoring, I'm currently leaning towards new space reports. These look quite innovative compared to what board reports and Jira dashboards can currently do, and, on top of that, Home Dashboards are a nice addition if you want to create cross-app reports and visualizations. 📊

In the end, from a theoretical point of view, all of that looks great, but the organization does need to be ready to potentially change (or adjust) their current processes and way of working. 😅

[Nikola Perisic]

Have you also checked this article: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management/portfolio-management

This is more leaned JPD, but you can tailor it to Jira as well.