JIRA Portfolio supporting SAFE

[Claire Rogers]

Hello,

I need to configure JIRA Portfolio to support a SAFE implementation where not only do you have Intiatives > Features > Stories, but also a higher level bucket such as Portfolio Epic that spans across multiple JIRA projects. Has anyone been able to do something like that?

[carolyn french]

Hi Claire, and welcome to community!

Yes, you will definitely be able to create more hierarchy levels to be able to customize to exactly what you need. 

This documentation should get you started and there are many other community members that can give you first-hand stories of how to get the most out of Portfolio.

Have a great weekend, and hope this helps,

Carolyn

[John Horwath]

Hi Claire,

We did it and it is amazing!  We started with the cPrime Whitepaper.  It is a good guide, to get started.  It does not tell you how to do it, but a good JIRA Admin can figure it out. We are running 11 teams and 6 Shared Services teams in two ARTs.  

It works and extremely well.  We have an outside firm helping us with the SAFe Implementation and they cannot believe how amazing our JIRA setup is support SAFe.

John

[Susanna Kullberg]

Hi John! 

Sounds really interesting! I have read the cPrime whitepaper, but I still don’t understand why there is only one layer of Epics. In SAFe there are portfolio, solution and program Epics. But not in that set-up. How have you dealt with Epics on your program/solution level? 

BR 

Susanna

[Dan Frost]

Hey Susanna,

What we find for most folks doing SAFe in Jira is that using Structure to drive the hierarchy provides the necessary flexibility (in both hierarchy and issue linking) to configure a good, SAFe capable Jira environment.

Ultimately we also repurpose (and rename using SAFe Epic to Feature translator) the native Jira Epic to the "feature level" and build hierarchical levels above that. Lastly, we use Power Scripts for Jira to drive some automation that really helps keep the Portfolio/SAFe Program showing the right things (this also helps with performance).

Let me know if I can answer any other questions.

[John Horwath]

Thanks Dan, that is spot-on!