How do I get portfolio to display estimate lengths instead of release lengths?

[Deleted user]

See image. I have used Portfilio before and generally like it, but for some reason after starting a trial at my new company the gantt chart is not displaying properly out of the box.

The estimated issues are showing the full length of the screen to the expected release date, instead of their estimated lengths as in all the demos and when I've used it before. This obviously makes the tool useless. The only thing I can tell is that somehow the scheduled start/end dates are getting set, but we don't have those fields in JIRA, and they are not editable in Portfolio.

I am working hard to convince my stakeholders we should allocate the cost for this, but if I can't get it to display useful info I'll have to fail the trial. Please help!

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

Welp! After a few weeks with customer service and escalating to the engineering level they let me know it was because I had the teams set to "Scrum" instead of "Kanban." If anyone else has this problem, just go into the Teams tab in Portfolio and switch them to Kanban and the chart will immediately start showing the hourly estimates as expected.

@Walter Buggenhout, thank you so much for diving in and trying to help me! 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @[deleted],

From what I can see, the chart is correct. Maybe there's a few misunderstandings, so I will just try to explain why it looks the way it looks.

One thing to note upfront though: although the chart shows coloured bars to represent work items, it is not a gantt chart. It is a graphical representation of your scope on a timeline. Portfolio tries to schedule your work (scope) in the shortest possible time frame, based on the available capacity of your team. 

Your chart is currently showing stories by team member: Namesh will take care of 2 stories, Justin and Haseeb will each be doing one. Each team member has the capacity to start working on a story simulaneously, so they can all start at the start of your roadmap.

Looking specifically at the 2 stories assigned to Namesh, the chart just represents the order in which the stories are expected to be completed.

Things I cannot read from the chart is:

• whether you are using sprints or not
• what the capacity of your team (members) is
• what your estimation statistic is (days?)

I am guessing you are estimating in days, though. And as you only have 4 estimated stories, for a total of 21 days. As you have 3 people available to do the work, your timeline only lasts for like 2 weeks to complete all the work. With sprints, that would be a single sprint. Portfolio will always show your stories to span the entire sprint. You can see the same thing on the image below, taken from a sample plan having more data:

Once you get more data in your plan, your schedule should start to look more like the example. But once again: it is not a gantt chart; it is a graphical representation of your work on a timeline.

[Deleted user]

Thanks Walter for the extensive write up. Unfortunately, no help here. The estimates are in hours both on the JIRA side and the Portfolio settings. I have asked JIRA customer service for help as well but so far none is to be had, and as we all know it takes forever to get a response no matter how fast you respond to them. 

To answer your questions directly:

• Estimates are in hours
• Each person works 6.5 hours per day on the plan
• We have no sprints, in fact I deleted all the boards thinking that was the problem

I'm not sure what estimation statistic is, but if you are talking about the setting in portfolio for "planning unit," I have it set to hours as well. The one good hint I have is the scheduled start and scheduled end are getting set to today and the release date from JIRA it looks like. So I have spent hours looking for some sprint that JIRA thinks I am running and trying to break the tickets away from the sprint so they just display hours.

What's worse is that about a month ago I worked in a different company where the Portfolio chart was acting as expected. So I know it can work, I just have to find whatever hidden setting is messing me up and I'm getting no help from JIRA on that. Frankly, I'm sick of it.

This is obviously not going to work if I can't fix it. We are trialing Portfolio and will likely cancel and find an alternative. So sick of paying to battle these tools which are supposed to be a tool to make us all more efficient and productive. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

I can understand your frustration, @[deleted],

As I have no insight in your settings regarding team capacity etc, I quickly set up a trial plan for myself where the timeline was immediately showing what you are expecting to see.

As I cannot see some of your settings from your description / screenshot, can you just verify 2 things:

• check whether the data source for your plan is a kanban board (not a filter, not a project, not a scrum board, but a kanban board).
• make sure to set default estimates for your unestimated stories. Set them high enough, so you have more relevant data to feed the schedule. In order to do so, go to your plan settings (hit the ... button next to your plan's name) and under scheduling set some default values as shown here:

Once you've done that, hit the Calculate button and see what happens.

[Deleted user]

Tried to reply and it doesn't look like it went through...

TL;DR I can confirm issue sources are set to the Project. There is no Kanban board or Scrum board. 

I usually don't have a default estimate but in this case I gave it a shot. Here's what happened, 

I really think there's something going on with the issues themselves on the JIRA software side, but I have no idea what it could be...