Portfolio - prioritizing releases and/or projects, not specific issues

[Juan Carlos Gil Montoro]

Hi there!

We are starting to use JIRA and Portfolio.

We have many projects with many issues each and we need to schedule the whole thing using the Portfolio automatic scheduling.

We do have priorities for each issue, but my question goes as follows: how could we prioritise a given release of a given project or even a given project all together over other releases and projects? The trivial solution (increase the priority of the corresponding issues) does not scale well.

Thank you very much in advance.

Juan Carlos---

[Martin Suntinger · Accepted solution]

Hi @Juan Carlos Gil Montoro, there is different approaches to solve this: 

1) you can order releases, and work with relative release dates: If work items have a fixed assignment to a particular release, and you the work on release 2 can start only after release 1 is done (or with some overlap you specify), then you could use this to overrule the priority on issues. This works only for releases within the same project though. 

2) In the Portfolio Live Plans (in labs currently), you could leverage the new hierarchy model and actually group work items together as a hierachy. What changed in Live Plans is that you can prioritize on all levels of the hierarchy, so for example you could create a 4th level above Initiatives (if you use those today, or instead of initiatives) to group entire projects together, and prioritize those. Now if you drag and drop on any hierachy level it will bulk-rank the items underneath. As noted, this applies only to the new Live Plans, so I'd recommend to give them a shot even while still in labs. 

[Juan Carlos Gil Montoro]

Thank you Martin.

And sorry for the late ACK.

Regards,

Juan Carlos---

[Pierre]

Please note however deep hierarchy add cumbersome new items in your board view when it's time to plan your sprints...

[Piotr Gorak]

I came across the same issue and this thread helped me. But I have some additional questions:

• when I reorder the releases, does it always takes precedence over how the issues are ranked in "all releases" view?
• what logic is applied when the releases overlap with each other? I actually have a real-life situation like that. Release B starts in the middle of Release A. I have 7 releases that may overlap with each other. When I start reordering them, I can see the effects on scheduling, but I'm not sure what logic is behind that.

Piotr

[Peter T]

Hi Juan,

There is nothing out of the box for prioritization of projects and releases in JIRA. Portfolio is as well focused on creating a detailed plan for the actual issues/stories.  That is the main reason we created a Cycle Control - which is the first true program and release management solution for JIRA.

We will be happy to show you how you can define, prioritize, manage and release your initiatives. You can publish real-time release calendars and define custom metrics to help determine your status.

If you are interested we will be happy to give you a demo. Feel free to contact us at support@botronsoft.com

Cheers,
Peter T

[Juan Carlos Gil Montoro]

Thank you Peter.

I'll have a look to Cycle Control, thank you.

Regards,

Juan Carlos---