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

[#1]

In the past, Portfolio for Jira required a high degree of detail–foresight that was unrealistic for many businesses to have–in order to produce a reliable long-term roadmap. We're turning that notion on its head by providing early access to a new planning experience that will be a hallmark of the upcoming 3.0 release.

The features now available for early access in version 2.19 allow you to easily create a realistic, data-driven roadmap across multiple teams in the earliest stages of the planning process, even when details like who will do the work and what level of effort is involved are still unknown. This provides a huge benefit to all businesses, regardless of where they are in their agile journey or the way they plan their teams' work.

For those of you who were keeping a close eye on Portfolio's development, you might have seen that we quietly enabled opt-in access to the new planning experience in version 2.18. As we build towards Portfolio for Jira 3.0, our focus is on collecting feedback as we iterate on and expand the included features and functionality. 

Portfolio for Jira Server/Data Center version 2.19

What's the scoop on the new planning experience?

The planning experience in Portfolio for Jira 2.19 offers a new way to visualize, groom, and communicate your roadmaps. Today, it includes the following features and more.

• A total UI refresh making it easier to see the data that powers your roadmap

• New drag and drop scheduling functionality with enhanced coloring and grouping options

• Improved dependency tracking to instantly surface conflicting blockers so they can be resolved early

Color issues to show the status of work or the team assigned.

 

Group issues based on assignee, project, or team. 

Identify dependencies and manage them with simple drag and drop capabilities.

Ready to take the new experience for a test drive? There is no intensive migration process involved. Simply convert your existing plans to the new planning experience with a few simple clicks. And, not to worry, you can always disable the new experience as an early access feature without loss of data. Here's a link to help you set up the new experience. 

Given the testing we've done thus far, we also feel confident these new capabilities are suited for your production environments.

We need your help...

Help us make your planning experience delightful and intuitive - your feedback at this stage will help influence our roadmap as we continue building out the planning experience leading up to 3.0. Please submit any and all feedback that you or your team may have using the in-product "Give feedback" button. Our team will review each submission and reach out with any questions as needed. 

Portfolio for Jira has the power to transform how you plan your roadmaps and now can support an even broader set of planning scenarios. We hope you'll join us in making it even better. Get access to version 2.19 in the Atlassian Marketplace today.

Questions or comments? Leave them here and let us know what you think.

[Jason D Smith]

Some of our users want "gantt" charts, and we're currently using biggantt. I'd love to be able to get rid of that plugin and have them migrate to Portfolio. Drag and drop is critical to this being acceptable to them.

[Nick Zigomanis]

The biggest problem with Portfolio is that for anything but small data sets it's useless. Doesn't matter how much eye candy you put into it, until you resolve that it's hard to take it seriously.

[Roi Fine]

Hi @Nick Zigomanis, 

Our goal is to help you and your organization plan and track work across team of teams. We are aware that every company has different data set and way of working in Jira. One of the biggest changes we made in Portfolio's new planning experience is that the automatic scheduling is optional. That means you can groom, schedule, and visualize your team of teams' backlog manually, so it make sense for you and your stakeholders.

It would be great to know if there are any other "scale" issues that currently hinder your experience with Portfolio?

Lastly, we would love you to try the new version and provide us feedback.

Cheers, 

Roi | Product manager | Portfolio for Jira 

[samrobertsofficial]

Hey, @Jason D Smith

I'm happy to say drag and drop is part of this new experience. You can resize, adjust any item this way. If you move an epic, all the children will move with it. You can also drag and drop to organise issues. This means both reordering, and adjusting the hierarchy. This was something that was previously not possible in Portfolio, and we heard a lot of demand for.

We know we haven't gotten everything 100% smooth yet so we'd love your feedback on it. There are some cases we know drag and drop can get tricky, so we want to try and get it right.

Thanks for checking it out, let me know if you have any more questions.

Sam,

UX Designer | Portfolio for Jira

[Pavel Petrov]

Can I have a second portfolio now e.g. for another business unit? And what about the availability of a person related to the global availability. Do I still get no notifications or any note that a person gets allocated work in different projects more than the availability?

[Fernando]

Here are some problems with Portfolio:

• The availability of a person related to the global availability. Would be nice to have several plans and each one represented the real availability of the team
• Capacity report : would be nice to get the total allocated work by person only one time (independently of how many teams this person be part of)
• Allocation/Teams :  how it will work? Will be possible to have parallelism between 1 or more activities by person? 

[Roi Fine]

Hi Pavel,

Yes, it is still possible to create multiple Portfolio plans. We are working on a fresh new capacity, our first iteration will have the availability and utilization of a team bounded within one plan. 

Please let us know your thoughts,

Cheers,

Roi | Product manager | Portfolio for Jira 

[Roi Fine]

Hi @Fernando,

Thanks for raising these problems. Please allow me to share my teams thinking and plans: 

Global availability across multiple plans is not in our short-medium term roadmap. We understand it's a need but at the moment we are focusing on making the planning experience as complete and delightful within a plan. In the meantime you can follow this ticket for future updates https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-80

We are working on a fresh new capacity, our first iteration will have the availability and utilization of teams only. In a later iteration we intended to bring individual members into the mix.

Lastly, you can definitely manually assign work for members and teams to work on at the same time.

I hope that helps.

We would love to hear further feedback from you about the new experience.

Best,

Roi | Product manager | Portfolio for Jira 

[Alexander S.]

Hi,

I really like the "new experience", but I'm still lacking several key features (most have been actually carried over from the "old experience" version), namely:

• filtering by, grouping by and adjusting viewed time frame to sprints;
• filtering by issue status (why the hell would I need to see a bunch of done issues when I'm planning?);
• ability to add to columns custom field values (old version has it);
• estimating time based on custom field values - JIRA board allows it, so why can't Portfolio simply carry over that setting and forces me to use Target Start / End dates instead?

Thanks for considering above suggestions for new versions.

[Rhys Christian]

Hey @Alexander S.,

Thanks for sharing your feedback.

We're continuing to implement new ways to filter and view for different needs. We're currently working on much of the the functionality you've requested. Namely:

• Viewing sprints in the timeline when viewing teams will provide you the context of your sprint dates as well as be the first step towards allowing you to understand to your sprint capacity utilisation while you plan work on your timeline.
• Filtering by issue status is in our scope. Our initial implementation before our GA release will allow you to initially filter by status category (i.e "to do", "in progress", "completed"). We plan to improve on this in the future to also include the specific status in each category.
• Custom field support will also be gradually rolled-out - initially with text and single-select fields before expanding to other types. We're interested in understanding which custom field types you desire the most? 
• Could you please expand on what you mean by the time-based estimates based on custom fields? You can still switch your estimation methodology to hours/ days as you could with the old experience - i'm just not sure what you mean by associating that with a custom field. Is this related to being able to use your own date fields?

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. It's really valuable for us at this point in development.

Cheers,

Rhys | Portfolio for Jira Product Management

[Piotr Zolnierek]

Cloud? Is portfolio for cloud dead already?

[Bree Davies]

Hi @Piotr Zolnierek we're closely following the feedback from the server version in Cloud. It's not dead :) - Bree, Portfolio for Jira PM

[Lutz Hoeger]

Hi @Bree Davies, any rough estimate on when Cloud customers may see an EA? Thanks.

[Pavel Petrov]

@Roi Fine

Thanks for your response. I understand I can create separate plans now. However, I want to create a separate portfolio and then be able to have programs and plans in a portfolio. 

Here is how I imagine we'll use it. We have two business units in our organisation and each of them has mostly different initiatives there (initiative = plans, programs, projects... in the context here). Thus, I expect to be able to assign a pool of resources to a business unit (or a portfolio). Then depending on each case I'll have a project and / or plan where I can choose from the pool of resources. I expect programs not to have resources as they will use the plans. However, a portfolio can have both programs and plans that are not part of a program. I agree that it will work, even if portfolios do not have their pool of resources. In that case I won't be able to know how many not booked or available resources I have. That will will help when planning separate projects in one portfolio.

Another, feature that will make sense (to me at least) is to tie the project roles to the teams in plans. For example we can have types in the roles that can indicate if the people in that role are "plannable" or not. These that are not can be the consulted/informed people, viewers or just users that can report (create) issues. Then, the "plannable" people will usually be roles like dev, qa, senior member, pm / po .. depending on the context of the project. In that case plans will be able to use the team from the roles in a project and will make sense in both the plan and project. 

Similar thing will be handy if we have "plan default boards" they can just use the same filter be of the type the team is set - KanBan, Scrum. 

Hope some of the concerns and ideas here make sense to you.

Best,

Pavel

[Deleted user]

I'm confused about the Cloud questions.  When I look at Portfolio for Jira on the Atlassian site (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio/pricing), there is cloud pricing.  But the questions above seem to indicate that it's not available.

My company is just starting to upgrade from server 7.2 to Cloud b32a154a.  We thought Portfolio would be available.  Is that not correct?

Thank you.

[Josh Frank]

@[deleted], Portfolio for Jira is available on Cloud. The new planning experience described above is not available on Cloud. Our Server and Cloud teams prioritize for the unique requirements of their customer bases. There's some good context in the beginning of this webinar we recently did about why our Server and Cloud products have some differences.  

@Lutz Hoeger, There are no immediate plans to bring this experience to Portfolio Cloud. As always, we learn from updates to both deployment options and those learnings are incorporated into the teams' roadmaps. 

[Deleted user]

Thank you @Josh Berman.  That makes sense.

[Jimi Wikman]

Any plans to support SAFe in Portfolio for Jira anytime soon? I hear many ar looking at BigPicture specifically for the Pi Planning feature that is currently missing in Portfolio for Jira?

[Michael Mettenleiter]

For a project we use the dynamic release date. Unfortunately I find in the new experience no possibility to have this calculated.

Am I blind or is this functionality not yet available?
In Release is always the note "Not scheduled"

[Chris Fernandes]

Hi Atlassian, when can we see this in Cloud?

[Luke Lam]

it looks like Reports went away in the new Portfolio Planning view.  Is there any way to replicate reporting on Themes ?

[Piotr Zolnierek]

Please dear Atlassian, give some (more) love to Portfolio Cloud ... this is the biggest selling point for us for using JIRA.

[Josh Berman]

Hi, @Chris Fernandes.

We got a similar question above which a fellow member of the Atlassian Team, @Josh Frank, supplied this answer for... "There are no immediate plans to bring this experience to Portfolio Cloud. As always, we learn from updates to both deployment options and those learnings are incorporated into the teams' roadmaps."

-Josh

[matt lavinia]

@Josh Frank @Josh Berman - Please add this to the Portfolio Cloud version. Is there any way to influence the timeline for when this will be available to Cloud?

[Bree Davies]

@matt lavinia we're listening closely to the product feedback and also the comments on Community posts like these. So you're already doing all the right things to influence the Cloud roadmap. If you'd like to talk in more detail, I'm happy to anytime - please email bdavies@atlassian.com and we can find a time that suits. 

We have loads of super exciting plans for 2019 - more news to come soon!