How can I tie skills in Portfolio to stories/work scheduled in upcoming sprints?

[katelyn.bossany]

Our team was able to add skills in Portfolio for our team members. As we're planning the upcoming sprint, we're trying to utilize those skill sets. However, we can't figure out how they connect to the stories and bugs in our backlog. There doesn't appear to be a skills field in the cards. 

I've found some helpful articles in the Community, but none that clearly show how our stories tie to the skill sets that have been entered. There are some references in the help articles/discussion about Stages, but I can't tell if these are a requirement in order to tie skills to stories. 

Any help is greatly appreciated. 

[Joshwa Marcalle]

Same problem I have had.

I ended up uninstalling portfolio. Did not find the use for it.

If anyone has a better alternative, please share- 

[Demelza Green]

As Andrew mentioned, you can't expose the estimate values for skills within issues in Jira. You will only be able to see the total value as represented in the Estimates field. If you burn-down/reduce your time from within Jira, this will also reduce all your estimates based on the % allocation used on either the Skill or the Stage if used.

Another option to look at is perhaps creating sub-tasks for each individual skill, which would then house it's own estimate. These will roll up to the story level. For example;

• Sub-Task 1: Front-End Development
• Sub-Task 2: Back-End Development
• Sub-Task 3: QA

You can hide sub-tasks from the boards if having them display does not provide any value. You will still need to manage the state of the sub-tasks, ensuring these are moved to Done. If you are happy for them to display on your boards, then you will need to move sub-tasks and the parent story across the board.

[Andrew Zibuda]

The skills only tie in within Portfolio. You can break down the story by skill within Portfolio by assigning a certain amount of the points to each skill, but it won't be represented in JIRA unless you make custom fields.

[katelyn.bossany]

Thank you @Andrew Zibuda! Has anyone used custom fields for this purpose and have any suggestions on how to set them up? 

[Andrew Zibuda]

I've not seen any examples of it before, mostly due to the fact that they likely wouldn't correlate with Portfolio's fields as they are built in, meaning whenever you change the field you would have to update it in 2 places.

I'm not sure if there's a way to expose the variables to JIRA proper from Portfolio, but I'm pretty sure there isn't, and they only made that one exception for Epic -> Initiative links.

In my experience Portfolio grows exponentially more useless the larger the team is that utilizes it, to the point of being unusable. It is extremely strict and offers no flexibility in terms of scheduling or breaking down the work further as you've mentioned.