How do people communicate the results from JIRA Portfolio to teams and stakeholders?

Ryan Porter June 9, 2015

JIRA Portfolio is a fantastic little gizmo for automatically generating a schedule of task assignments for teams.  But it apparently has no features of any kind for communicating the task schedules to the people who are supposed to be doing them.  Obviously there are people who are using this planning successfully for their teams, so I'm curious to know how you use the results?

In scrum mode, JIRA Portfolio will generate a list of sprints and it will assign tasks to them.  But those sprints have nothing to do with the sprints on the scrum team boards in JIRA Agile.  Are individual scrum teams supposed to look at the schedule of tasks generated by JIRA Portfolio and manually add the items suggested in the schedule to their sprints during sprint planning?  Doesn't that mean that this tool creates a lot more work for humans instead of eliminating work?

In kanban mode, JIRA Portfolio is all about prioritization, but like with scrum mode, those priorities don't seem to have anything at all to do with the kanban boards that the teams actually use when they do work.  Is some manager or team lead supposed to manually prioritize tasks in the backlogs of the kanban boards, based on the suggested scheduling that JIRA Portfolio generates?

I'm dying to have ANY WAY to communicate the generated task schedule to the teams.  A calendar for each person with their task assignments would be helpful?  Maybe through integration with Team Calendar like somebody has already suggested?  How about linking the sprints in JIRA Portfolio with the sprints in JIRA Agile?  How about automatically sorting the task backlogs for kanban teams based on the results from JIRA Portfolio?  I would even settle for an API bot that generates daily or weekly "this is what JIRA thinks you should work on next" notifications.  Anything would be better than nothing.

How do people do it now?  You actually expect every stakeholder and team member to use JIRA Portfolio directly?  Do you have one or two managers who use it and then spends hours manually drafting project plan emails to team members and stakeholders?  How is this supposed to work?

2 answers

0 votes
Robert Roskam July 9, 2015

@Ryan Wyler, the results are due dates. If the team is scrum based, starting from today and going on whatever interval you setup (2 weeks), you'll have due dates in those intervals for stories, epics, releases. That's how you know what sprint they belong to.

For kanban, stories get put end to end, filling up days. If stories cross days, the last day is the due date. So 3 stories at 8 hours total fill up a day, but 3 stories at 3 hours a piece (9 total) have one of the stories run into the next day (I think) . Epics that contain these stories will end with the last story that they contain.

Personally, I find this scheduling to be ridiculous for scrum. It's understandable for kanban because it's continuous, although your schedule does look silly.

For scrum, it should sync with the sprints, which is hard because how JIRA handles sprints. (E.g., one project can be in multiple sprints, and one sprint can contain multiple projects.) For Kanban, I wish there were more settings to manage the assumptions, such as: use issue priority from JIRA instead of portfolio rank.

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