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Portfolio for Jira enables realistic strategic planning, regardless of how many teams or people you have working towards your goals. Together with your Jira application, Portfolio for Jira provides a single source of truth for the current and future health of your initiatives.

Portfolio for Jira highly enhances the benefits you get from your Jira application, no matter the role you have in your team.

Check out some of the popular use cases of Portfolio for Jira in the market, depending on the role being taken on.

What's your role?

I'm a Product Manager

As a product manager, you need a way to quickly turn feature ideas and customer feedback into a compelling product roadmap. This roadmap is then used to provide visibility into the team's progress for your stakeholders and for yourself as well. You especially need visibility so you can keep your roadmap up-to-date as things change. If this sounds like you, read on about the ways Portfolio for Jira can help you plan work better for your team.


Organize your ideas

Start by defining initiatives in Portfolio for Jira. Think of initiatives as chunks of work that span multiple epics and teams, so you can see what needs to be done in the next planning cycle. Once you’ve defined initiatives, they need to be broken down into smaller chunks to populate the backlog:

  1. Define your initiatives

    Define your initiatives by following the steps provided in Configuring initiatives and other hierarchy levels.

  2. Break down the initiatives into epics and stories

    Break your initiatives down into epics and stories that are ready for implementation; they can be turned into actual Jira issues.

    Follow the steps provided in Creating and deleting issues.

  3. Import existing work items

    Import all of the relevant epics and stories that already exist in your Jira application, and assign them to the right initiatives.

    Follow the steps provided in Importing, exporting and duplicating classic plans.

Build a roadmap

A roadmap is based on scope, time, and people. You can play with these variables in Portfolio for Jira to see different roadmap scenarios. Once you have a backlog of ideas in the form of work items, you need to get everything on a roadmap to share with your stakeholders. These are the three things you need to build a roadmap:

  1. Set the scope

    Once you've organized your ideas and the mental backlog is laid out, the work just needs to be estimated. 

  2. Target release dates

    Configure your release dates by creating project-specific releases.
  3. Select your teams

    Define your teams and their velocities in hours or points. The velocity can be linked directly to a board in your Jira application.
    Learn more about resources in Adding and removing teams.

I'm a Development Manager

As a Development Manager, you’re responsible for making realistic commitments on your team's behalf. During the planning, you need a clear roadmap that you and the product manager have agreed on so you can run the numbers and ensure your team can get it all done. You need a way to easily plan your team's resources and see the capacity of the team at any point in time so you have data to show what’s possible and what isn’t. You also want to keep stakeholders informed of progress and status without too much hassle. If this sounds like you, keep reading to learn about three ways Portfolio for Jira helps you plan better.


Master the art of capacity planning

In cases where you have specialized and diverse capabilities in your team, you may want to be more granular with capacity planning. This helps you keep your plan realistic and avoid bottlenecks caused by the fact that you need certain skills to complete a work item.

Learn more about your team capabilities in Learn stages and skills.

See the team capacity on the roadmap

Portfolio for Jira makes it easier for you to understand what your team is working on at a much more granular level. This is helpful when you're planning the scope with project and product managers — you will then have the data to support your views on what’s possible and what isn’t.

  • Capacity view
    The capacity view displays both planned capacity and resource utilization. Capacity is displayed as story points for Scrum teams, while for Kanban teams, capacity is plotted using calendar weeks. You can view capacity by release, team, and even team members.
  • Stories view
    The stories view shows individual stories and their stages of work. When using Scrum, the schedule creates a swimlane per team and shows the team’s sprints, as well as the stories scheduled for each sprint. When using Kanban, this view plots stories on a day-granularity timeline. You can also view the schedule as stories by team member.

See Scheduling behavior to learn more about these views.

Track your projects' progress

In Portfolio for Jira, you can see the progress for individual story items, epics, and initiatives. For anything that is unestimated, you can show those items in relation to items that are estimated. This will allow you to see the percentage of work done on estimated items while also seeing that some unestimated items are still outstanding and require work.

  1. Set your tracking options

    Portfolio for Jira supports different ways to track progress depending on your team's requirements. 
    Learn to configure the progress tracking by following the steps provided in Tracking progress and status.
  2. View your status and progress in the scope view

    The progress and status columns in the scope view of your plan display the progress of your plan items.  

    • Issue status - Only exists if the work item links to one or multiple Jira issues. It shows the actual workflow status of these issues. In the case of multiple issue links, an icon is shown for the status of each linked issue. 
    • Progress - Sum of work logs on the linkedJiraissues, as well as their child elements. 

Learn to use the views by following the steps provided in Status and progress tracking.

I'm a Project Manager

As a project manager, you plan and coordinate work against milestones to make sure you're meeting deadlines, and to show how projects are tracking against business goals. Dependencies are a big thing for you – they account for 90% of your planning-related headaches – so you need to map out these dependencies, and not just track them. Having a graphical or visual presentation of information is really helpful at times.


Plan according to milestones
  1. Set the scope

    Once you've organized your ideas, you can re-prioritize work items accordingly.
  2. Define your releases

    Configure your release dates by following the steps provided in Configuring release dates.
Manage dependencies so the timeline is realistic

In Portfolio for Jira, it’s possible to control the sequence in which items are scheduled on the roadmap by setting explicit dependencies.

  1. Create and manage your dependencies
    Configure your release dates by following the steps provided in Managing Portfolio dependencies.
  2. Configure your hierarchy levels.
    Display the dependencies in the graphical schedule by following the steps given in Configure initiatives and other hierarchy levels.
Track program toward your goals

In Portfolio for Jira, you can set themes and track progress against these themes to make sure the organization is executing on strategy, and everyone is aligned to the same priorities.

  1. Create your focus areas
    Themes are high-level strategic focus areas, value streams, or investment categories — you can use themes to set priorities and define where your teams should devote most of their time.
    Create and configure your themes by following the steps in Themes report.
  2. Keep track of the progress 
    The graphical schedule shows the results of resource calculations and forecasting based on your plan data. It also provides visibility into forecasted release dates. 
    Track your progress by following the steps provided in Tracking progress and status.
Last modified on Sep 28, 2018

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