How to force Portfolio for Jira to assign a user to Jira board?

[Henk Keuris]

I currently have a portfolio plan, which is automatically scheduled and automatically assigns an assignee to a story (i.o.w. it's always set to Calculate).

However, when I commit the changes to push to Jira projects, the assignee doesn't get changed.

How do I force portfolio to push the assignee, as per the plan, to the Jira project?

[Allard van Helbergen · Accepted solution]

Hi @Henk Keuris,

The team member and assignee fields do not directly map to each other as in Portfolio multiple people can be assigned to a ticket (which is not possible for the assignee field). Therefore,  Portfolio will never automatically push the calculated team member in a plan to Jira. 

However, when there is a single manual assignment in the team member cell in a plan, this should be pushed back to the assignee field. 

So, once you are happy with the calculation of the team member for an issue, manually assign that single person to that issue in your plan, recalculate (this shouldn't affect your schedule, as it's the same person as that was just calculated), and then commit that back. You should then see that show up in Jira.

Let me know if that helps.

Cheers,
Allard

[Henk Keuris]

Thanks Allard,

That is definitely a bit more cumbersome than I'd like it to be, but I understand the reasoning. Thanks for the answer!

[Majken Connor]

@Allard van Helbergen

I hope that never isn't literal. I appreciate the limitation, but we're either requiring teams to come to Portfolio to find what they should work on or we're cutting off a powerful calculation.

I see that in the current settings you can limit the number of users who can be assigned to a story. If that is set to 1, it should then be possible to set the assignee from Portfolio. Or perhaps we could have a members field that shows up on issues?

When we're looking at larger organizations, having to manually set the assignee is not going to be a viable workaround.

[Henk Keuris]

I have to agree with @Majken Connor. A possible feature request could be to put a action box that will apply the currently selected single team member from calculate to a manually selected member, on selected issues.

In my opinion, this is something that should be resolved.

[Michael Kelleher]

@Majken Connor The maximum number of users per story is not functioning for me, super lame

[Ryan]

Could we have a separate "Assignee" field that is just a value pulled from Portfolio?  I think it would make more sense and more tightly correlate the two applications and processes if we could see who the portfolio application determined had the capacity to work on that story.  Something like "Portfolio Suggested Assignee/s".

[Pierre Leroux]

I also hope it’s something that will be reconsidered in the future. And by the way such a feature exists in SCRUM mode (bulk assign by sprint). I am currently trying to convince my colleagues to use portfolio, and there is some resistance because in KANBAN mode, there is only a manual assignation and it is far from user friendly : there is no way to preselect issues that  have only one assignee suggested to auto-assign in bulk. Plus you have to scroll to find back your we resource, for each task. I would suggest adding a feature that would auto-assign a preselected bunch of issues, in bulk, the exact same way Portfolio make us do it in SCEUM mode.