Tracking Your Jira PI Plan with Kendis for Atlassian

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Managing a Program Increment (PI) across multiple teams is a complex undertaking, especially when using a powerful but granular tool like Jira. Kendis serves as a powerful extension, acting as a dynamic visualization layer that brings your disparate Jira data together. It provides the program-level clarity and control needed to manage a PI effectively, without disrupting your team-level workflows in Jira.

Jira excels at empowering autonomous teams, but getting a unified, real-time view of a multi-team PI can be a manual and time-consuming process. The challenge lies in harmonizing data from various team projects to create a single, cohesive picture of the PI's status. 

The Challenge of Multi-Team PI Planning

Even with Jira’s flexibility, coordinating across multiple teams and projects for a PI can be demanding. The main challenge isn’t Jira itself, but the nature of scaling Agile — bringing together distributed data into a single, real-time picture of the program. Common hurdles include:

• Fragmented Data and Coordination: Teams often work in separate projects, making it difficult to get a consolidated view of the PI's status. Coordinating dependencies and ensuring everyone is working toward the same goals becomes a significant manual effort.
  
  
• Manual Data Consolidation: Aggregating data from various teams, tools, and spreadsheets to create a single source of truth is time-consuming and prone to errors. This leads to outdated reports and a lack of confidence in the data.
  
  
• Inefficient Reporting: Providing timely and accurate progress reports to leadership and stakeholders can be a struggle. Generating these reports often involves manual data manipulation, diverting time from more critical tasks.
  
  
• Limited Visibility into PI Health: Without a centralized dashboard, it's challenging to track key metrics like progress against PI objectives, identify critical risks, or proactively manage dependencies before they become blockers.

How Kendis Works with Jira

Kendis integrates directly with Jira Cloud and Data Center through a two-way sync. Here’s how it adds value for PI planning:

• Defining a PI scope: You can use a JQL query or a saved filter to pull in the work items (features, epics, or stories) that make up a PI. Kendis automatically aggregates this across multiple Jira projects into one view.
  

• Program board visualization: Instead of looking at individual team boards separately, Kendis shows all the work in one digital program board. This board is drag-and-drop, so you can plan sprints, align features, and immediately see dependencies across teams.
  
  

• Dependencies mapped visually: If you already use Jira issue links to track dependencies, Kendis will surface them as visual connectors on the program board. If you add a dependency in Kendis, it creates the corresponding issue link in Jira.
  

• Real-time synchronization: Any change made in Jira — such as updating a story’s sprint, changing an epic’s status, or resolving an issue — is reflected in Kendis instantly. The same works in reverse. This ensures there’s a single source of truth, with no manual syncing needed.
  
  

• Program objectives and risks: Jira remains the system of record for team work, but Kendis adds dedicated spaces to define PI objectives and risks. These can be tracked alongside features and stories, giving context at the program level.
  
  

• Scope change tracking: During PI execution, if new stories are added, removed, or moved between sprints in Jira, Kendis automatically highlights those changes. This helps program leads keep an eye on whether the PI plan is still on track.

Supporting Key Agile Activities

Kendis is especially useful during program-level events and syncs:

• PI Planning: During planning sessions, the Kendis PI Planning and Program Board becomes the focal point. Teams can drag and drop features into sprints, visualize dependencies as they’re discussed, and ensure objectives are captured alongside the plan.
  
  

• Scrum of Scrums: Instead of relying on verbal updates, teams can use the live Kendis board to review progress and blockers. This shifts the focus of sync meetings from reporting status to solving issues.
  
  

• Leadership updates: Stakeholders can view consolidated PI progress, dependencies, and risks at a glance. This makes it easier to provide updates without having to build custom reports or exports.

Jira + Kendis: Complementary Roles

Jira continues to excel at what it was built for: helping teams manage and deliver their work. Kendis builds on that by offering a program-level perspective for PI planning and execution. The two tools work together: Jira as the detailed work management system, and Kendis as the coordination and visualization layer across teams.