What’s your biggest challenge with scaling agile in Jira?

[Robert Nadon]

Hi all,

As someone who’s worked extensively with Jira for over ten years and is certified as a SAFe 6 SPC, I’m interested to hear about the challenges others have faced when scaling agile practices within Jira.

Some common hurdles I’ve encountered or heard about include:

• Navigating the differences in hierarchy structures

• Managing an overload of tools

• Addressing terminology mismatches between Jira and agile frameworks

• Maintaining clear, distinct roles across the various SAFe levels—Team, Program, Large Solution, and Portfolio

For those who are also using Scaled Agile, have you experienced similar difficulties when trying to represent these structures in Jira? I’d love to hear about your experiences and any solutions you’ve found helpful

Best,

Robert

[Calvin]

We've started looking at SAFE and some things that I'm seeing:

• Project vs Team vs Train vs etc. Basically Jira seems to be project focused so its 1 jira project per project. While developers are team focused so they want 1 project for their team. But the SAFE lead is SAFE focused so they want a view of all their "trains" and are asking for 1 project for the whole ART
• You have the "roadmap/vision" in one project, then you have the ART kanban in another, then you have the actual work in 5 other actual projects. The devs are sitting there wondering which one to go to?
  • On top of this I notice that Cloud your boards can only sit on one area, so we have a project lead with a board with 3 projects because they only want to do 1 standup for the whole team who are working in 3 different things but resources are 80% the same. But no one knows where that board is located because its not in the project sidebar they are in its in the other one. So now it sits on an ART project that is used just to hold the board of the 5 other projects.
• This is more of SAFE issue personally, but having that SAFE lead has a lot of jira users fixing up "jira ticket data" then actually developing. Making sure x is parented to y to z to cascade appropriately.
• Because SAFE is so specific about their Program Increments (PI) people are obsessed now with capacity and time planning. I don't know if Jira does this super well, its something we need to look into more, but we are indeed trying to figure out whether we need an App (tempo?) or if Plans does enough. People want to show they are doing 150% work, while leads want to show they are doing 50% work.
• I haven't tried it yet, but it seems being in a Team in an org isn't fantastic. You have owners who create teams that the site admin can't touch. And because a project can have multiple teams you are manually adding teams to every jira ticket because thats how ART leads are viewing it in their Plans board. So people spend all their time making sure Team/PI/Fixed Version/Sprint/Parent link/etc on every single item.
• Some teams set their Jira project as a team instead of a "project / piece of work" for SAFE but now finance has no idea which jira tickets are for which "piece of work / actual project" to charge out easily
• SAFE in particular has "Feature" inbetween the Epic and story. I'm hoping in cloud I can rename Epic to feature, but in Data Centre we can't and we just have to pretend its a feature haha
• Enablers help out all teams, so now we are essentially giving them permissions to every project. And since "your specialization" can mean you work in between ARTs you essentially give access to all
• Getting workflows right for SAFE is something I'd love to see how others are doing. It seems like release should be based on the feature, so the end workflows (User testing, ready for production etc) are on the feature. But thats usually best case scenario, a lot of times users are having to release on the Story as a small incremental release to get 80% of the stories in. So they are cutting up their features near the end of the PI every single time.

Not really a Jira issue, but Safe is sooo "jargon" heavy and moving towards it can be difficult. A standup is now a team sync? I have to create the Portfolio where? I'm not supposed to do what before PI planning session? 

Overall I'd love to see a project or article thats doing it in Jira and see their learning and how they are doing it end to end. How they are cascading. Whether they are using goals/product discover for that upper level. How they deal with capacity planning. Maybe one already exists? Tbh I haven't checked.

[Robert Nadon]

Hi @Calvin,

This is fantastic—there’s a lot of great insight here! Below are a few thoughts and reflections on your excellent points:

• Your first two bullets seem to center around how to define projects in a way that aligns with enterprise needs. That’s always a tricky topic, often specific to each organization. That said, Jira does allow for categorizing and grouping projects effectively. For example, you can create individual projects for each car or team and then group them under a shared category for the train. It does raise the question—are your teams participating in multiple trains or teams simultaneously?
• As for capacity and time planning, the fundamentals are certainly in place. However, from what I’ve seen, capacity planning is highly dependent on accurate estimation and story pointing. This is where challenges often arise. It's not uncommon for teams to "game the system"—inflating story points to show higher velocity. Avoiding that requires a strong, healthy team culture grounded in trust and transparency.
• It also sounds like teams may have a lot of independence in how they structure and create projects. While flexibility is great, too much variation can become a challenge—especially when trying to align with SAFe. Consistency is key when creating and configuring projects across teams.
• On that note, SAFe introduces a Feature layer between Epics and Stories. If you're looking to implement that structure in Jira, I highly recommend this resource:
  🔗 How Forty8Fifty Labs Built a Custom SAFe Issue Hierarchy
• Also, keep in mind that Jira workflows are tied to issue (or rather, work item) types. That means Features, Stories, Programs, and Epics can all have distinct workflows. For example, a Feature might include stages for user testing and release activities, while a Story might follow a simpler path like: Open → In Progress → Code Review → Done. The flexibility Jira provides here is one of its greatest strengths, especially in enterprise environments where customization is crucial.

There’s definitely a lot more to unpack here. Great discussion—maybe it’s time we host an ACE session focused on Jira and SAFe?

Best,

Robert

[Calvin]

Wow thanks Robert, didn't expect you to answer all my points so I honestly really appreciate it! Its fantastic to hear your thoughts on it and how you view it as well!