Portfolio View

Hello - I currently have a space where we have worked grouped by strategic theme, initiative, epics, capabilities, features, and then by lower-level work like deliverable, feedback, bugs, stories, tasks, etc. I am now being asked to generate a portfolio level view, with pie charts of completion, product line progress, a workflow governance (e.g. ideation, opportunity analysis, approved, in development, pilot, commercial launch). Can I take what I have in a 'space' and actually build this level of detail out or do I have to create a project or multiple projects first to then build out all the other items I need? I have used Azure Dev Ops and it seemed more intuitive than Jira. I'm hoping that the rework is minimal.

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Hey @Fuentes_ Connie _BW-REM_

and welcome to the community!

Jira can definitely support portfolio-level views, though the approach depends on how your work is structured.

Using what you already have

You don't necessarily need to create new projects (now called spaces). The key is how your hierarchy is set up:

If you're using Jira's native hierarchy (e.g., epics → stories/tasks with parent links), you can leverage Advanced Planning (Plans) — as @Matteo Vecchiato suggested. Plans let you pull issues from multiple projects into a single timeline view, with rollup progress bars and grouping by hierarchy levels. Since you're on Premium (as it seems), this is included. It's the closest native tool for portfolio-level visibility.
For the workflow governance stages you described (ideation, opportunity analysis, approved, etc.), you'd typically model these as either a workflow (status-based) or a custom field on your higher-level items (initiatives/capabilities). Plans can then group or filter by these stages.
For pie charts and progress breakdowns, Jira dashboards with gadgets like "Pie Chart" (group by status, priority, or custom fields) and "Two Dimensional Filter Statistics" can give you visual summaries. You'd create a saved JQL filter scoping to the relevant issues and build gadgets around it.

Where native Jira gets limited

The challenge is that Jira's native hierarchy only goes three levels deep (epic → story → subtask). Your structure — strategic theme → initiative → epic → capability → feature → deliverables — goes significantly deeper. Plans can handle some of this with categories and custom hierarchy levels, but it gets complex. And dashboards don't natively aggregate completion percentages across deeply nested hierarchies.

Minimal rework path: Start by mapping your Azure DevOps work item types to Jira issue types. Use parent links for the top levels (initiative → epic) and potentially issue links for deeper nesting. Then build a Plan pulling all relevant projects/boards.

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If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a spreadsheet-style view for your Jira data with highly configurable issue hierarchies — you can define as many levels as you need, based on both parent/child relationships and issue links. So visualizing your full structure (strategic theme → initiative → epic → capability → feature → deliverable) in a single view is straightforward.

For the portfolio-level aggregation you need, JXL's sum-ups can roll up completion percentages, story points, or any numeric field across any hierarchy level. Combined with conditional formatting, you can visually highlight items by governance stage or completion status — giving you an at-a-glance portfolio view without building separate dashboard gadgets.

It also works across any number of projects, so you wouldn't need to restructure anything — just point a JXL sheet at your existing issues via JQL.

Hope that helps, best regards,

Paul