Introducing a brand new planning experience in Portfolio for Jira (Server/DC)

[Roi Fine]

Hey Nick, 

Thanks for your honest feedback. Portfolio for Jira Server/DC is the natural way for teams to scale their agile practices by creating a shared roadmap. We've got a lot of great improvements coming very soon, which address some of your pain points. Some but not all are:

• Indeed, some teams have a lot of issues on their backlog. I am aware, the current issue limit is not a great experience, as it forces teams to create filters. There are definitely improvements in the experience to make here.
• In regards to performance, we constantly invest in making things better. We improved performance for large plans greatly. You would be able to feel the difference once upgrading to Jira 7.10 and above & Portfolio 2.25 and above
• In regards to integrating better with other apps in the Atlassian marketplace, this is something we plan to look into going into next year.
• I would really appreciate if you could report the bug you mentioned about ignoring mandatory epic link here: https://support.atlassian.com/contact/
• Ranking behaviour in the new experience got improved. Parent/child ranking is independent.

All of your points, are really good feedback for our future development. 

Thank you,

Roi Fine | Product Manager

[Deleted user]

HI

I have Few requests:

• We have implemented a synchronized scrum for our teams to help better coordinate the dependencies and also predict the capacity of the organization for planning. In Portfolio, it pulls Sprint Names from each team board. Is there a capability that will allow teams to define common sprint cadence that can be used in all team boards and plan and track work? 
• Show Cumulative Story Points at epic and initiative level.
• Status Breakdown - Can you provide the status in terms of story points? Original Story Points field can store total swag. Actual SPs show the progress against that. I dont see the Original Story Points Field currently.
• Dash Boards: Is there a way I can create a dash board that shows the total velocity across teams in my plan and also show the stability of it sprint over sprint (at least last 6-12 sprints). Portfolio pulls the team velocities but doesn't really show summary view for leaders to understand how much the org can deliver every sprint. Variation of the capacity may also encourage good conversations and right agile behaviors.
• Dash Boards: Is there a way, I can release burn down view across teams using story points
  • Teams use original story points to estimate baseline at epic level (part of high level planning)
  • Story Points evolve as they refine and execute epics. (Cumulative of story points at story level)
  • Dashboard need to take the total of original story points across all epics in the release and compare that with completed story points (cumulative) and display the progress made, how much more is left (% and SPs). It can also provide insights if this is doable based on overall capacity of the org. (It can assume that every team can do the remaining work)

[samrobertsofficial]

Hey @[deleted] ,

I hope I can help answer some of those questions. 

1. Sprint names - You can set up multiple teams pointing to the same issue source, then make sure they have the same iteration length, then in theory everything should match. 
2. Show cumulative points. Yes this can be previewed by going to "View settings" (in the top right of the roadmap tab), then enable "Show rolled-up values". This won't actually apply the estimate to the epics and initiative, but you'll be able to see what the aggregate of children issues is.
3. Status breakdown. At the moment we just have progress based on story status. We've been hearing more feedback for doing progress based on estimates too. The reason we didn't ship with this first is not all teams use estimation, so they wouldn't get any value from this kind of progress. We'll look to prioritise this for a future release (I can't guarantee exactly when it will ship)
4. Dashboard questions - This is a bit outside my own area of expertise. I'm guessing this would be more done with Jira dashboards than inside Portfolio. You might need to post these questions in a Jira forum, or maybe someone else can help fill in these for you. 

Thanks for trying out Portfolio for Jira! Let me know if you have more questions. 

Sam

[David Bigness]

Can one create milestones in this experience?

[David Bigness]

Are there plans to create a SAFe program board with this module?

[Deleted user]

@S 

Thanks for your reply. Few additional questions

- Are you taking away of the Themes Report in new version?

- Are we going to have Original Story Points field to capture baseline in new version? Teams would like to keep the original estimate to compare with actuals later.

- I don't see "View Settings" option in my New Experience pilot view. Any idea why?

[Edmund Caraceni]

The new look is nice, love the expanded filtering capability, especially on labels.  That's something that's been missing for a long while.  I'm disappointed however, that the set of fields available is now limited and pre-set.  Are there plans to restore this in the future?

[Scott Stephens]

Until there is the Capacity view and reporting in the new experience we will continue to have to use the previous model.

What is the delivery expectation of this as for me this is the key feature lacking?

[Mark Hasenstab]

Jake, Back in January you mentioned that there are some great things coming in the Cloud version in the next 6 months.  We are now well into April, are there any updates on Cloud development plans? 

We are getting ready to integrate Portfolio into our development and release process.  The second phase of this will focus on Scheduling with Teams, Skills and Stages.  In light of Server 3.0 release and the lack of support for Stages and Skills, significant changes to Teams and no real insight regarding future Cloud directions, further investment in the Cloud based tool in our environment is no longer viable.  

[cchampoux]

I am new to Portfolio (adept at Confluence and JIRA administration) and it's a LOT to look at and organize.  I'm being asked about Themes.  With the 3.0 Portfolio (trial) version, is there a way to create Themes?  I read somewhere that we can use Labels, but the Themes looked pretty cool.

~*Christine

[samrobertsofficial]

Hey folks, sorry for the delay in responses as you can imagine with Atlassian summit and the launch of Portfolio 3 we've been quite busy. 

David, 

1. At the moment you cannot create 'milestones' in Portfolio. We do have the concept of releases (Jira versions). We have heard feedback about milestones, however we want them to be part of Jira, and not just something that only exists in Portfolio. 
2. Portfolio is flexible for different frameworks, but is not specifically built for SAFe. We do have customers running SAFe who are using it. This document is a little bit old but talks about this topic: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio/scaling-agile-with-safe

@[deleted] ,

1. One of the problem with themes in Portfolio 2 is that they only existed inside Portfolio, and weren't in Jira. This meant themes were hard to access via gadgets, dashboards, and the API. With Portfolio 3, we've added better support for custom fields, (including colouring, grouping by them) as a replacement. We don't yet have support for the themes report (pie graph). In the meantime you can always continue to use the old UI with themes even with a 3.x Portfolio version.
2. Original story points - We don't have this added in yet, but I would say a similar answer to above.
3. You should see 'view settings' on the roadmap tab in the top right. If you don't see it, it's most likely you are on an older version of the Portfolio add-on. 

@Edmund Caraceni ,

1. Thanks for the positive feedback. You should be able to show and hide the majority of the fields that exist in Jira. To do this click the '...' menu in the fields section and a pop-up should show you a list. If that isn't working there might be a bug that we haven't discovered.

@Scott Stephens 

1. The new experience now supports team-level capacity planning. We are looking into how we can best add individual-level capacity too. Let me know if you have any feedback on this. 

@Mark Hasenstab - I don't want this to be seen as ignoring your question, as it's important. However I want to make sure you get a response from the right person at Atlassian. I've forwarded your message to Jake so that he sees it.

@cchampoux - Regarding the themes report, please see my first response to Santhi (above). 

[Edmund Caraceni]

@samrobertsofficialWith respect to fields available, I can confirm that when clicking the '...' element, there is a fixed subset of Jira fields available and the ability to add custom fields.  Any Jira field outside the fixed list is not available.

[Deleted user]

Is this a bug Or related to the issue count limitation?

- Portfolio view doesn't show closed stories

[samrobertsofficial]

@[deleted] - The 3 places to check for this are

1. If your plan is pulling in boards, are completed issues included in your board filters?
2. Double check what the "completed issues" plan configuration setting is set to. The completed issues might be older than this number.
3. Do you have any plan filters applied for status?

More at https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/issue-sources-967895168.html

[samrobertsofficial]

@Edmund Caraceni at the moment we do not support every single type of custom field, or fields generated by 3rd party apps. If there's ones that are particularly important that you are missing, could you please submit a "give feedback" ticket from inside a portfolio plan (this can be found in the top right menu next to the share button). This will help us prioritize which fields to add next.

[Jake]

Hi @Mark Hasenstab,

Happy Easter! And thanks for writing in and following up on the plans for our Cloud roadmap.

Back in January I shared that the Portfolio team was hard at work on a roadmapping and cross-project planning experience in Jira Cloud that would be simpler, more intuitive, and ultimately more valuable for you and your teams. I'm excited to share that as of Summit 2019, which took place two weeks ago in Las Vegas, we can share what that experience is: Jira Software Premium!

As I also shared in January, instead of putting bandaids on some of the things that weren't living up to users' standards in Portfolio, the Portfolio team chose to take a fresh look at the problems Portfolio was fundamentally trying to solve and a more holistic approach to solving these problems. And because a huge part of creating something that we know users will ultimately love is getting direct input from users such as yourself as we build, I'm excited to share that the Portfolio team has launched an EAP program for Jira Software Premium. You can sign up for this EAP program at the above link, and I would highly encourage you to do so. Members of the EAP program will be able to provide direct feedback to our PMs and impact the roadmap and feature set of this new offering.

By building Jira Software Premium, and the advanced roadmapping functionality within, from the ground up and with your input, our team is confident we are delivering and will deliver advanced roadmapping functionality that will be second to none in Jira Software.

Again, I highly encourage you to join the EAP program today and telling our team exactly what we can include that will provide you with the ideal roadmapping experience for your specific team and use case.

Thank you for your continued patronage and support of our products, and I hope you're excited as we are about the possibilities ahead for Jira Software Premium.

Jake

cc @Andy O'Dower, @A_Raadls, @Mitch Karren, @Sarah Kegley, @Andrew Zibuda

[Mark Hasenstab]

Jake,

Appreciate the invite and will sign up but need some further clarity on this.  We have Jira software standard today and we have Portfolio manager for the Cloud.  Is Jira Software Premium now a new product offering?  If so, is there no further investment in Portfolio manager for the Cloud?  Is there a migration path from Portfolio to Premium?

Mark

[Jake]

Hi @Mark Hasenstab

Great! We look forward to having you in the Jira Software Cloud EAP program and to your feedback, which will help shape the product's future roadmap. Please note that for the entirety of the EAP program Jira Software Premium comes at no additional cost, as at this point our goal is to collect as much feedback as possible from users and teams like yours.

Jira Software Premium is a new edition of our flagship product that includes, among other things, native roadmapping functionality with advanced features like dependency mapping and forecasting. Unfortunately at the moment there is no direct migration path between Portfolio for Jira Cloud and Jira Software Premium, although we may consider one in the future if there is enough customer demand.

Regarding the Portfolio for Jira Cloud roadmap, in complete transparency I can share that in the coming months we will be focusing the majority of our time and energies on the advanced roadmapping functionality in Jira Software Premium instead of new features in Portfolio for Jira Cloud. As I mentioned above, with this new premium edition we have the opportunity to build exactly what users are asking us for, from the ground up, and faster. And our team is excited to do so!

Thanks,
Jake

[A_Raadls]

@Jake Hey Jake, really wanted to express some hope for Jira Premium!  I am in the EAP and experimenting around.  Looks like you guys are taking this seriously with, from what I can tell, a rebuild of the functions that were supposed to work better in Portfolio, in particular for people using Jira not just for development (which is my main focus granted) like myself.  UX looks very modern, nice work.  Very glad to see this as I have been shopping around for about a month with serious intention of moving on from you guys, and some of the new apps on the block (Clickup, Coda, Notion, Slite, Clubhouse.io, and others) are moving more quickly and are just easier to use.

If you are monitoring this thread for any suggestions, I think one big thing I keep coming back to is the fact that Jira does not have a good way to categorize work outside of forced projects/issues:

- Your "project category" function is token at best.  I'm sure a lot of teams could use the ability to categorize their projects in ways that would allow sorting, some minimal attributes in a project group, etc.  With Jira, I can't even set up so that when I land on my project page, the categories sort the way I'd like.  

- Epics, "old" Initiatives from Portfolio.  By forcing these to be both issue types, and reside in projects, you don't really give the true ability to group work with these.  Since Jira is design in a way that "projects" are not "projects" the way a layperson thinks, ie "I have a project this week to get an ad campaign done," but rather grouping of work that is similar, that does not end necessarily, this means that the natural way to put work in projects is to group similar types of work like frontend development, API build, platform work, etc.  But I think a lot of teams, like mine, do initiatives where they have tasks that include multiple types of work.  Like frontend, infrastructure, etc. in one Release.  That should be trackable outside any constraint of a project.  On top of this, the Epic is an issue, so it gets treated the same.  This basically makes issues sub-tasks, with the difference between actual subtasks that you can have them from other projects in one Epic - and that actually confuses things further.  Clubhouse.io has a great set up that practically was the one reason I wanted to move to them:  Epics and Milestones:  Epics are groups of issues with them that can be pulled from all projects, and Milestones are groups of Epics.  Very simple, great for reporting and tracking.

- Boards:  These two offer a great way to track and plan work, but you force them to belong to a project.  All other tools I've seen simply use boards as a way to sort work from any subset of tasks, they have nothing to do with any project.  It has been cumbersome to see in the left nav when I'm in a board info about the project its associate with.  I'd like a simple board or list view where I can see everything in Jira, and use all the power of JQL to sort, without any association with any project.  Because in reality I'm using all my boards on a cross-project basis (the boards that generate within projects are practically never touched in our particular case), so the reference to the projects in the left nav just forces more clicks and less usability of your interface.

Hope that's useful. And very hopeful for the Jira Premium.  For now I am staying with you guys, I have faith you will develop stuff that will make it even easier to get work done with Jira!

[Jake]

@A_Raadls

Thank you for this note. It made my day!

I have shared your verbatim feedback directly with the Jira Premium team and wanted to pass along their sincere gratitude as well. We can't build great products without this kind of direct and honest feedback from users such as yourself. Please keep it coming!

We share your optimism and excitement about Jira Premium and I'm thrilled that you're sticking with us as we continue to build it out. We have every intention of nailing this and won't stop until we do!

Thank you for your ongoing patronage and support of Atlassian and our products. It truly means the world to us.

Jake

[Jeff Robertz]

Fully agree with @Jake ! Very useful and detailed analysis @A_Raadls

I really like the direction Jira premium takes!

As a side note, I will relay here the 'frustration' of my client as they pay for Jira Portfolio (Cloud) and face some annoying limitations a.o.:

• Nexgen project do not synchronise both ways
• The Portfolio timeline is not usable/nice looking

Knowing Atlassian, we believe you'll get this fixed at some point :-)

Jeff

[Michael David]

@Jake Would the roadmap tool become available for Classic projects after signing up for JIRA Software Premium?

Currently, it is only available for next-gen projects under JIRA Software Standard but the agile features and ability to customize are limited for this project type. Portfolio is the only planning tool available for Classic projects and unfortunately, the UI is underwhelming. 

Can you confirm whether or not the features listed on this page, specifically "Roadmaps", "Dependency Mapping", "Epic Forecasting", "Capacity Management", "Hierarchy above Epics" , will be available for Classic Projects under JSP? 

Thanks. 

[Josh Frank]

@Michael David There are no plans currently to bring the Premium product features to Classic projects. We are working, however, to build up our next-gen template to be closer in feature parity to our Classic projects. You'll see a lot of new features coming to our next-gen template over the next year that will address some of the concerns you mention. In the meantime, please feel free to sign up for our Early Access Program and share your feedback on what the product should become. 

Cheers,

Josh 

[A_Raadls]

@Jake , really appreciate the direct shout-out back to me, and I'm glad that feedback was useful.  I am evaluating the Premium EAP right now, and I have an appointment in fact with your research team.

There is a lot to say as my team has used Jira for several years, but we only about 1 1/2 years ago started a set-up that was more comprehensive, including a reset of how our software development used it, and at the same time trying to bring the entire team over via Jira Core.  Granted, we didn't really see that Jira Core offered anything "extra" aside from just templates on how to structure Jira for invoice tracking, HR, sales, etc.  What I'd been hoping for was some true extra DB function for non-development types of data with Core.  What I mean is that customers in the CRM would not be just different issue types, but actual different data types you could associate with issues.  I use an add-on now called Atlas CRM that does exactly this, and it's been useful.

Also another bit of feedback if you're up for some more :), I too noticed you guys are not explicitly bringing over the next-gen functionality to Classic.  I've emailed support on this, and got the same response.  For my team, that's not a problem as long as most of what is offered in Classic makes its way into Next-Gen.  I am lucky enough to be able to probably retire my Classic stuff with little issue and move straight to Next-Gen, but I am waiting for a few more features.,  One is true visibility of issues key's in the Description and comments field - we use this a lot.  Right now, even though the "/" command works in those fields - and the "/" is a great improvement for quick navigating around the issue screen - when I link up another task or Confluence page (and this is another bonus - you can get access to both Jira and Confluence content in one keystroke), what results is just a plain link, with no reference to the Jira Key, status, etc. that I get when I manually type in the key in the Classic Jira in comments and description fields.

I am also eagerly awaiting how you guys intend to handle the "higher level" hierarchy you speak of in the Premium roadmap pages.  High hopes that you will find a way to go outside having that be just another type of issue, like the Initiatives were in Portfolio.  I know I already mentioned that, but it's at the top of my list!

I wish you guys speed with your roadmap implementation, and eager to see how it unfolds.  And congratulations again for a really big step forward with the new Jira Next-Gen UI improvements!  Each new feature you come out with really looks like it belongs in 2019!

[Jake]

Hi @A_Raadls

Good to hear from you, and appreciate the response!

My biggest advice would be to please share any and all of this feedback with the research team when you speak to them. Their findings are funneled directly to the Product teams, so it's in your best interest (and ours) if you are as open and honest with them as you're being here.

Regarding "higher level" hierarchy specifically, there are a number of different ways we could approach this problem. That said, please also share this exact feedback with our research team. Like most things in Jira, there are a number of different teams with a number of different approaches to any given problem. Definitely let us know the problem you need to solve with a higher level hierarchy feature and we'll do our best to build something that accommodates.

As always, thank you for your ongoing support and patronage. We're glad you're as excited as we are about Premium. It's shaping up to be an epic 2019!

Best,
Jake