What is a Portfolio plan
This is the alpha version of Portfolio for Jira 3.0 — your sneak peek at the improved functionality that's just around the corner. As such, do note the following:
- Some features may not be complete just yet, as we're continuously iterating on these.
- Because it's an alpha version, the documentation will only be visible to you, our alpha users. You will not find any alpha pages in the usual page sidebar.
We've linked the table of contents below, so you can easily navigate to the alpha pages at any time.
Before you begin
For Portfolio for Jira to capture the latest and greatest data from Jira, you'll have to organize your work in Jira, into what we call issue sources in Portfolio. Portfolio first captures your Jira issues, and uses the corresponding issue details to create the ideal schedule for your teams. The issues can be scheduled across sprints, months, even years.
These are the issue sources in Portfolio, into which you'll have to organize your work in Jira:
| Boards | A board displays issues from one or more projects, giving you a flexible way of viewing, managing, and reporting on work in progress. There are two types of boards in Jira Software:
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| Projects | A project in Jira is a collection of issues that is defined according to your organization's requirements. For example, it could be a software development project, a marketing campaign, or a website enhancement request system. |
| Filters | Your board's filter is a Jira issue filter (a JQL query) that specifies which issues are included on your board. For example, your board may include issues from multiple projects, or from only one project, or from a particular component of a project. Only the administrator of a board or a user with the 'Portfolio for Jira Administrators' global permission can configure a board's filter. |
Out of the three (3) issue sources, we recommend that you use boards — when boards are chosen, and it's a Scrum board in particular, Portfolio for Jira can then use the velocity of past sprints to account for team velocity. See Creating and deleting plans for more details.
What is a Portfolio plan?
A Portfolio plan is essentially a roadmap of all the work that you manage in Jira. Work can be anything you're involved in — it can be the issues your teams are working on, the releases your teams have committed to delivering, and more.
Portfolio pulls in these work items from Jira, and then uses an automatic scheduling mechanism to create a realistic schedule for your teams. This resulting schedule is based on relevant issue details that are logged in both Portfolio and Jira.
Over time, you may gain inside and relevant knowledge on the work that your team's doing. You'd typically know more than what the algorithm can determine — and more often than not, you'd know that a certain issue should be scheduled at a certain time, even if Portfolio schedules the issue differently.
Unfortunately, in 2.0 plans, it's not that easy going against the automatic scheduling mechanism. You can't simply drag and drop an issue to its ideal schedule — and this is one of the big changes we have in store for you in Portfolio for Jira 3.0. To see what's specifically changing, check out Comparing alpha and current versions.
This is how a plan in Portfolio for Jira 3.0 looks like:
| 1 | Configure plan settings, like the name of your plan, or the issue sources your plan is using. You can also delete a plan from the settings icon. |
| 2 | Navigate to different views of your plan:
See Working with Portfolio plans to know more about these views in your plan. |
| 3 | Filter work in your plan, so you're viewing only the work you need to see. You can filter your work by hierarchy levels, releases, and other filters. You can also choose to view only the issues that are scheduled for a certain timeframe in your plan. Choose one of the timeframe options:
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| 4 | The different sections in the roadmap view of your plan, where you can view and work on issues accordingly:
See Working with Portfolio plans for more details. |
| 5 | Perform actions for your plan:
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See Working with Portfolio plans for more details.