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3. Creating Portfolio plans

Getting started with Portfolio for Jira

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Before you begin

Depending on how your organization is structured, the content on this page is meant for Portfolio for Jira administrators or Portfolio plan owners.

To help you set your teams up for success, we've prepared this getting started guide that discusses how to set up Portfolio for Jira with your existing Jira instance.

The guide discusses the typical end-to-end path that users and administrators may find themselves taking part in when using Portfolio for Jira. You'll also find high-level content on Portfolio concepts, as well as some recommendations and optional steps you can consider, as you flesh out your plan.

Creating Portfolio plans

The content on this page is written with the assumption that you've already performed the following tasks:

  • Figured out the issue sources to use in your Portfolio plans
  • Created the issue types and hierarchy levels, to map your plans to the work of your teams
  • Defined the dependencies needed when planning work for your teams.
  • Ensured that important issue details are surfacing across your Portfolio plans and Jira.

See 2. Preparing your planning environment if you haven't completed any of these tasks.

Distinguishing between types of plans

After setting up your environment, you're just about ready to start planning work for your teams.

In Portfolio for Jira, you have two ways to plan work for your teams:

How to plan work...Which essentially means...

Using a mix of both automatic and manual scheduling

  • The improved planning interface lets you manually plan work for your teams — you can drag and drop the issues in the timeline, to manually schedule these issues for your team. You can also directly set dates in the plan.
  • You can perform manual planning, while also use the automatic scheduling feature.
  • The main difference is that with the improved interface, you have the option to accept the changes being suggested by the automatic scheduling feature. This is not like in a live plan, where the changes are automatically implemented in the plan.

We recommend you plan work for your teams using the improved interface in Portfolio for Jira version 3.0 and later.

A plan with the improved interface will have the timeline beside the issues themselves, making it easier to visualize how an issue is scheduled in the plan.

Sample plan, with the improved interface

Purely using the automatic scheduling feature in Portfolio plans

  • Portfolio will automatically create a schedule of all the work in a plan, based on several scheduling factors.
  • Portfolio will also automatically assign teams to issues, take dependencies and priorities into account.
  • Think of Portfolio as a planning tool that generates a realistic forecast of the work all your teams are taking on.

You'll need to create a Portfolio for Jira live plan . This is the type of plan that's available in Portfolio for Jira versions 2.0 to 2.27.

A Portfolio live plan will have the timeline above the scope of issues.

Sample live plan in versions 2.0 to 2.27

Creating a plan

There are loading limits to take note of when using plans in Portfolio for Jira. Loading limits restrict the number of issues that can be loaded into a plan, thereby preventing the schedule of a plan from becoming too large for Portfolio for Jira to process.

If a plan becomes too large, this can cause your Jira instance to time out. To prevent this, you can consider creating multiple plans and spreading the work across these plans, or you can remove certain issues from the issue sources that you've connected to the plan.

Note the following loading limits in a plan:

  • Absolute issue limit: The number of issues you can load into a plan, which is 5000.
  • Hierarchy issue limit: The number of issues that can be displayed for each hierarchy level in the plan, which is 2000. This limit only applies when you're creating a plan; you will not be able to create a plan if the total number of issues exceeds 2000 for any of the hierarchy levels.
  • Project limit: The number of projects you can load into a plan, which is 100. This limit only applies when you're creating a plan; you will not be able to create a plan if the total number of projects in the plan exceeds 100.
  • Team limit: The number of teams you can access via shared team settings. The limit for the number of teams that a plan can directly display is 50. If you have more than 50 teams, some teams won't be displayed directly in the shared team settings page. To find teams that are not displaying, enter the team name in the search box.

The following sections outline the steps on how to create plans in Portfolio for Jira. If you prefer seeing the steps in action, check out this video instead.

Creating a plan with the improved interface

  1. In Jira, go to Portfolio (in header) > Create. The 'Create' page will be displayed.
  2. Select Plan > Create.
  3. Give your plan a name.
  4. Select one of the privacy options from the privacy drop-down:
    • No restrictions (default option) – all Portfolio users can view and access the plan
    • Private – only the creator of the plan can view, access, and edit the plan
    If you select private, only you can view, access, and edit the plan. No other user can view or even search for the plan, including Jira administrators and system administrators. You can change the privacy option as necessary.
  5. Click Next.
  6. Choose the issue sources (boards, projects, filters) that you want to use for your plan.
    • Out of the three (3) issue sources, we recommend that you use Scrum boards. This gives you the ability to manage sprints from those boards, plan the capacity of future sprints, and assign issues to sprints — all directly from your Portfolio plan.
    • If you choose a Scrum board as one of the issue sources in your plan, you'll also be asked to choose how you want to estimate your issues. We recommend that you use  story points .
    • See What is a Portfolio plan to know more about issue sources.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Choose the releases that are relevant to your work, then click Next.
    You'll only need to choose releases if there are existing releases in Jira, that are associated with the selected issue sources. By choosing the relevant releases, the issues assigned to these releases will display in your plan.
  9. You can choose to accept the suggested the teams that you want to include in your plan, or you can do either one of the following:
    • Configure the settings of the teams: agile method (Scrum or Kanban) and weekly capacity
      Note that for plans that have boards as issue sources, Portfolio for Jira will suggest the velocity for the team. The suggested velocity will be based on past performance, i.e. if the team previously completed any sprints in the corresponding boards.
    • Delete a team that you don't need to include in your plan, by clicking more () > Delete.

  10. Click Next.

  11. Confirm the issues that you want to include in your plan by selecting the corresponding checkboxes.
    By default, all the issues are selected. Filter the issues by project, issue source, issue key, or issue summary as needed.
  12. When you've marked all the issues you need, click Done.

For newly created plans and existing plans where the improved interface is enabled for the first time, the following will take place by default:

  • The plan will display issues starting from the highest hierarchy level that has at least 2 issues. If the plan has at least 2 issues at the highest initiative level, then it will display issues starting with initiatives.
  • If the plan has only 1 issue at any level above epics, then the issues will be displayed starting at the epic level.
  • The target start date, target end date, and status columns will be displayed in the fields section.
  • The issues are displayed to fit the width of the timeline, based on the earliest start date, earliest release, latest end date, and latest release of all issues in the plan.
  • You can change these details and settings any time moving forward. See Displaying issue details for more information.

Creating a live plan

If you're using Portfolio for Jira 3.0 or later, the following steps apply to you. If you're using any version from 2.0 to 2.27, see Creating and deleting plans instead.

Starting with Portfolio for Jira  3.0, newly created plans come with the improved interface by default. If you prefer to use live plans, you'll need to:

  1. Follow the steps in the above procedure, Creating a plan with the improved interface.
  2. Once your plan is created, you'll need to disable the interface by following the steps below:
    1. In your plan, click settings ( ) > Configure > Planning interface.
    2. Click Disable improved interface.

(info) Note that you'll need to disable the interface for each plan that has it, so you can go back to the previous planning layout.

Creating a program

A program is a high-level view that helps you track status and progress across multiple plans in Portfolio for Jira.Programs let you see how deliverables and releases align across work streams, and aggregate scope data into high-level scope tables and schedule views.

Programs and plans are different in the sense that they display information at different levels of granularity. Read about the distinction between programs and plans to know if using programs would be beneficial for you.

To create a program:

  1. In Jira, go to Portfolio (in header) > Create. The 'Create' page will be displayed.
  2. Select Plan > Create.
  3. Give your program a name, and choose one of the privacy options:
    • No restrictions (default option) – every Portfolio for Jira user will be able to access the program
    • Private – only the creator of the program has view and edit permissions
    Note that if you select private, only you will be able to see or access the program. The program will not be viewable by any other users, including Jiraadministrators and system administrators. If necessary, you can change the privacy option at any time.
  4. Select the plans you want to include in your program.
    If there are no available plans just yet, you can add them to the program you're creating later on.
  5. Click Create.
  • For a program to display information, it must have at least one plan added to it.
  • A plan can only exist in one program at a time, which means Plan A can only be added to Program 1. If you want to add Plan A to Program 2, you'll need to remove it from Program 1 first.
  • See the documentation on programs to know more about how programs work in Portfolio for Jira.


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Last modified on Sep 6, 2019

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