Best practices setting up portfolios

[heider_souza]

Hi team, do we have a "survive guide" or a " best practice guide" to setup portfoios in jira? 
I did create some specific kanban and structure, but I was wondering if there is something I could follow, specially regarding budgeting. 

I saw the Jira align, but didn't find much resources on it and I am setting up one specific portfolio this week. 
Thank you

[Iryna Prokop_SaaSJet_]

Hi @heider_souza ,

As mentioned above, you can create specific hierarchy for your team with native Jira's set up. However, to cover budgeting part, Jira's functions are quite limited.

As a Product manager, I also find a great value in portfolios to track my project finances, and I use a specialized add-on developed by my team - Time & Cost Tracker. This is a powerful Jira cost management tool to monitor project budget, labor costs & expenses, visualize data with dynamic reporting and charts, predicts budget overruns, etc.

With Time & Cost Tracker you will be able to create multiple portfolios to categorize your reports based on project, client, team, or any other criteria that makes sense for you.

 

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi @heider_souza 

Jira Align is a separate product that connects to Jira.

Its little brother is called "Advaced Roadmaps" and is available by default in Jira Premium. You should see a menu item called Plans in your Jira navigation bar.

First you will have to define the hiearchy of your Jira instance. On top of the default levels (epic - story/task/bug/... - subtask) you can add custom levels like initative, project or any other name that mifght suit your company or methodology.

There are plenty of articles about it and how to configure.

• Advanced roadmaps landing page
• epics, stories, themes
• A guide to portfolio management (PPM) 

I hope this puts you in the right direction!

[heider_souza]

Thank you. 
Yes the team had defined already, but they created a few different ones which is causing me a hard time to capture all. 
Portfolio kanban - one structure of Epic-Story/milestones
Project with Initiative-Epic-story
Project with Initiative-Epic-Workitem 

It doesn't make sense to me, justification was because we need to accommodate to non agile projects... Still not making much of sense... Any comment? 

[Charlie Misonne]

You should be able to create a single plan in advanced roadmaps and combine multiple Jira projects in the plan.

In the plan you can limit the view to only show the higher level (initiatives) when you only need a portfolio overview without the detailed tasks.

[heider_souza]

Thank you @Charlie Misonne , that is insightful. What about managing the portfolios? The structure the client has: a kanban with custom workflow and the epics representing their projects... 
Project hierarchy is different than the portfolio. 
Portfolio: Epic - story (that represents milestones)
Project: Initiative-Epic-Story

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi!

I'm not sure what you mean with "Project hierarchy is different than the portfolio."

And "managing the portfolio"? Do you need a view with all projects (epics?) in the portfolio with their status, start date, end date, ... You can do this in a Advanced roadmap plan by filtering for the higher levels only.

I'm sorry if I'm not 100% getting what you are looking for.

I missed this part in your question "specially regarding budgeting".

Advanced roadmaps does not support keeping track of financial data. In my experience this is often done outside of Jira (unfortunately). On Jira DC there is an app "tempo budgets" but it does not exist for Jira Cloud.
A very basic solution could be to keep track of the budget in a custom field. And because you are using structure you could perform some automatic calculations too.

Here is a related (old) question: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Advanced-planning-questions/Budgeting-with-JIRA-Portfolio-Cloud/qaq-p/1094414