Update: Jira Portfolio is now available for both Jira Cloud and Jira Server.

I’m excited to announce a new member to the Jira family: Jira Portfolio.  As agile methodology becomes the development pattern of choice for many teams, challenges ensue when scaling agile across the business. Development teams need to communicate status, progress and forecasts throughout the development cycle. Program managers need to coordinate releases across multiple programs. Managers and executives need clear insight into the evolution of the company portfolio.

Jira Portfolio provides a single, accurate view of work across projects and teams, enabling organizations to effectively review, plan, and manage initiatives.  Everyone in the organization can remain on the same page across the portfolio: developers, team leads, product owners, managers, and executive stakeholders.

Manage across teams

Agile focuses on the self organizing team. The team builds a backlog and works through that backlog using a series of sprints or iterations. The product owner can then forecast completion dates using the teams velocity through the backlog.

When multiple agile teams work together, it becomes harder to track progress across the company. Jira Portfolio enables organizations to effectively track initiatives which are large blocks of work spread across a series of agile teams. An initiative will combine epics from different agile teams encompassing the larger work item.

jira_portfolio_iniative_epic_story

Organizing epics across a large stream of work gives everyone in the company new insight into the health of the portfolio. Development teams can see the larger context in which their code operates seeing the roadmap in Jira Portfolio. Product owners can easily follow progress and release readiness of related components delivered by dependent teams. Managers and executives can track overall schedules across the board.

jira_portfolio_critical_path

Grow teams and maximize capacity

Effective project planning requires deep understanding of the scope and type of work ahead. It also requires an intimate understanding of the delivery teams and the skills they bring to the project. Jira Portfolio aligns the skills required by the work and the skills brought by the team. Managers can easily see which skill sets are needed over different phases of the project to maximize utilization of specialist team members. Teams can also see which skill sets are important to grow within their self organizing team.

jira_portfolio_specialist_skills

Schedule work effectively and react in real time

Large portfolios require additional planning metrics to ensure a coordinated delivery. Jira Portfolio has extensive resource allocation tools to track and manage many streams of work. Project managers and development managers can easily hone in on critical path streams of work as well as over allocated teams.

jira_portfolio_overallocated

Sometimes demand exceeds capacity. Managers and team leads can easily see how adjusting capacity, scope, and release cadence will affect the delivery of the program. Jira supports forecasting at the team or individual level. Jira Portfolio supports forecasting release dates based on teams and actual resources. Additionally, using virtual users, managers can see instantly how future hiring capacity will affect the schedule and roadmap..

jira_portfolio_virtual_users

Connect strategy to development reality

Jira Portfolio folds high-level initiatives into organization wide themes for an extra level of visibility. Themes parallel the strategic objectives of the organization. Jira Portfolio allows the entire organization to see progress and context at the highest level. Jira Portfolio’s rich reporting gives executives insight where the organization is spending time compared to its targeted resource allocation. Your development team already has deep context with Jira. Jira Portfolio connects the strategic vision of the company to the rich development ecosystem that is already inside of Jira.

jira_portfolio_theme_plan

Follow innovation at every level

Combined with Jira’s deep insight into source code, software organizations now have a fully transparent view of work from the organizational steering level down to each individual commit. Jira is the single source of truth for the entire organization from company initiatives all the way to individual check-ins. It’s the right level of insight at every level, all powered by Jira.

Atlassian is excited to add Jira Portfolio to the Jira family. We believe Jira Portfolio opens up new opportunities for Atlassian, its customers, and partners to innovate at the portfolio level. We look forward to working with our ecosystem as they create Add-Ons that extend what Jira Portfolio can deliver to customers.

Want to learn more? Join us for a free intro to Jira Portfolio webinar on Tuesday, September 30th, 2014 at 11am PDT. You’ll get an overview of its core capabilities, including how to:

  • Plan and manage business initiatives across multiple software teams while ensuring everyone is aligned on the bigger picture
  • Get up-to-date statuses without manually collecting data from numerous individual projects or contributors
  • Plan in real time to determine how changes might impact the schedule and roadmap

Hosted by Martin Suntinger, Product Manager for Jira Portfolio. Sign up today!


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Announcing Jira Portfolio: View, plan, & manage initiatives