PLEASE SAVE the Portfolio Themes feature in the new experience!

Mark Holmes March 27, 2019

No More Themes

The Classic Plan migration guide indicates Themes are no longer available in the new Planning experience in Portfolio.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/migration-guide-859479290.html

Themes are no longer available in the new planning experience. Instead, we're replicating much of its value by providing flexible coloring options for labels and other custom fields.

Problem

This was one of the GREATEST selling features to my strategic leadership given it is the only true portfolio management feature. I COMPLETE DISAGREE that you can get "much of its value by providing flexible coloring options for labels" unless they can also deliver the target/estimate/actuals capability that the report delivered.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/themes-report-816527579.html

Here is a picture of a sample I built to demo the concept to my leadership:

JIRA-Portfolio-Themes-report.png

Question

Is there ANY WAY to get Atlassian to keep the Themes capability?

No idea. No expectation of it being remotely likely. Just felt compelled to put it to the community ...

2 comments

Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 28, 2019

Hey @Mark Holmes ,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. We really appreciate the feedback.

I'm a Product Manager for Portfolio for Jira Server & Data Center and will be happy to share with your some insight on our direction with new experience of Portfolio.

Classic plans

Firstly, it's important to better explain that while we intend to remove Classic plans soon, we won't be removing the more familiar 2.0 Live plans that has been the center of the product for the past few years. Classic plans has been relatively hidden in the product for a couple of years now and has very few users currently using it. We intend for the 2.0 Live plans to still be available in the product for the foreseeable future and can still be used until the new experience matures to meet your needs. So if you still need this value it'll continue to be available for you while we continue to develop 3.0.

Themes

I also just want to note that as we build out the new experience there’ll be some functionality returning from the old experience, others we’re considering returning for the future but potentially in a different way, and some weren’t prioritised for the new experience as these features either had low usage or didn’t integrate properly with Jira. In each case we’ll be constantly validating our priorities and execution with customer feedback to ensure we build the right things and we build them right. 

We're also directing away from fields that only exist in Jira and cannot be accessed externally (i.e from Jira). So some specific fields such as Themes aren't planned to return. Instead we intend to re-implement the value of Themes but in a more flexible way. The intention would be to allow users to create their own custom 'Themes' using custom fields. The initial value of theme's is simply the ability to group these in the new experience and associate colouring with these custom fields. But we also recognise that the pie graph used by the old Themes feature is a highly valued so we'll be considering solutions to introduce this functionality to custom fields so we can reach value parity. Unfortunately this functionality hasn't been scoped for the release of 3.0 as we've focused our efforts on the more fundamental core features for the initial release. That being said, introducing this value parity is definitely a strong candidate for our Post-GA roadmap. Our roadmap is heavily guided by feedback we receive and we've been hearing quite a bit of similar feedback from customers throughout the Early access program who still desire this functionality. 

When we release Portfolio 3.0, it's not be the end of our development of the new experience - we've a lot of plans for features on the horizon. While I can't provide a timeframe or commitment for when we'll work on this, your feedback will be influential as we plan priorities and delivery of future functionality. 

I hope this information helps. The team is very open to hearing your suggestions and welcome your feedback constructively.

Kind regards,

Rhys | Product Management Portfolio for Jira Server & DC

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Mark Holmes March 29, 2019

@Rhys Christian thanks so much for getting back to me! I am encouraged to be reminded that this is a transition approach, and that there is still an opportunity for feedback.

But we also recognise that the pie graph used by the old Themes feature is a highly valued so we'll be considering solutions to introduce this functionality to custom fields so we can reach value parity. 

This is great to hear. Similar to Gadgets in Jira Dashboards such as Two-Dimentional filter results, I understand the value of a generic and flexible capabilities based on Jira fields. it would be GREAT to see a similar reporting capability available against existing or custom fields!

introducing this value parity is definitely a strong candidate for our Post-GA roadmap. Our roadmap is heavily guided by feedback we receive and we've been hearing quite a bit of similar feedback from customers throughout the Early access program who still desire this functionality.

Is there a better way or place for this feedback? Perhaps a feature request to be voted on?

Thanks again.

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Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 15, 2019

Hey Mark,

As we've developed 3.0 we've primarily been listening to feedback going through the 'Give feedback' button in the new experience. We've also been listening to other feedback such as this post.

We're definitely hearing you and your needs are being considered as we build our development roadmap. FYI - Our short-term roadmap is much around communicating the roadmap as well as going deeper with Capacity planning.

Just want to let you know that we're particularly interested in gauging the traction of the need for 'Themes' so we've got this public ticket so you can vote, add your thoughts and watch for any updates: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2627

Cheers,

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Jay Teborek January 8, 2020

Reinforcing the feedback here... Portfolio has very few features which let one display the roadmap with intelligent parsing. 

Themes allow color coding & selective display of distinct development elements.  This was the primary selling point of our organization deciding to use Portfolio to track our roadmap.  Removing Themes (absent a clear replacement) would make Atlassion unusable as a roadmap planning tool...   Jira/Portfolio is already pretty poor on display capabilities for communicating major roadmap emphasis to internal/external parties. 

Thanks for the consideration & replies here.

J

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Mark Holmes January 9, 2020

@Jay Teborek I agree. Honestly, when I saw the "New Experience" beta trial, my first thought was "Dang, this is a step back in value away from "agile" visibility with views for multiple levels, to something that is moving toward antiquated "cant" charts which will loose its cross-cutting value.

Athar Agha June 24, 2019

Just to add to this, we're currently evaluating portfolio rollout for our sector as well, and having themes aligned to practice groups is an incredibly imnportant aspect we would also want to retain

Is there a feature request or ticket we can track to ensure we have visibility of implementation and/or changes? Having group wide visibility for strategic themes is very important for product selection in our area.

Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 15, 2019

Hey Athar,

Thanks for sharing your need for this functionality. We've created a JAC ticket here so you can vote, add your thoughts and watch for any updates: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2627

Cheers,

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Mark Holmes July 16, 2019

@Rhys Christian big thanks for this.

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Renee_Tsielepi May 19, 2020

Agree - please bring themes back!!!

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