Portfolio Management

Project Portfolio Management for Agile Teams…
Project Portfolio Management can help you keep tabs on your stakeholders and the teams you’re working with, as well as all the others, and as it helps your organization respond to change. When implemented at the right scale, you’ll work at higher levels in the organization. To be agile at Atlassian, program managers use Jira , Jira Agile , and Confluence as their primary communication tools.

Plan your workflow

You can use universal transitions in the workflow so that requests can be moved freely between any status and customize it to your own business processes.

Set basic filter

When you want to track Epics between two projects, you can continue by creating a filter. Make sure to sort Epics by order so that you can prioritize them against each other in your Agile dashboard. Just like stories and bugs, Epics at this level also need to be prioritized against each other.

Once you have a filter, you can share it with anyone who wants to follow the project.

You can create a kanban board based on this filter. This kanban board will be the primary view that highlights the progress of both teams. You can create a board for each status in your workflow.

Epics from both teams should appear on this board. You can use swimlanes to separate work between mobile and web teams with tags. You can also tag each Epic with a theme in Jira.

See detailed status

Sometimes stakeholders want to drill down into a specific epic to see its detailed status. Jira Agile is fully integrated into Jira, so you can see agile information in the detailed view and query agile data with JQL. Let’s take a look at the large team support in Teams in Space inside Jira.

There are four main areas to gather information about this epic.

People section The people section in Jira provides context for who is involved in this Epic.
- Assignee - Person responsible for delivering this epic.
- Reporter - The person who owns the work wants this Epic.
- Sponsor - Some teams may want to track an executive sponsor at epic level. They can add a custom field for this value.
Requests regarding Epic This section lists all user stories for the epic. Jira provides up-to-date information about each user story included in this epic.
Explanation The epic description includes a high-level business case for this epic. You can provide a link to the epic report so stakeholders can quickly get a progress status for this epic.
Agile section Epics rarely stand alone in an Agile team. You can switch to the board view to see this epic with other priorities the team is working on.

Taken together, these four sections provide a complete description of an epic. You see the people involved, the work required, the business logic, and how other business priorities fit together.

Detailed status is reported

Stakeholders often want to know when a particular epic will be completed. The epic report in Jira Agile provides a detailed view of the progress for that epic. Providing a link in the epic’s description provides full transparency into the team’s progress for that epic.

Let's look at the three levels of hierarchy in an organization:

All levels can be tracked with Jira and Jira Agile.

Individual Epics - It is easy to filter epics in plan mode on Scrum boards. You can also see the epic in the detail view of Jira by going directly to that number.
Team view Each team should have a kanban board corresponding to the work organized around it with a product owner
Multi-project view You can use a kanban board to track epics across multiple teams. As nested teams complete work, the project view stays up to date with the latest status.

Working on the Project

1. Create a new project

First of all, you can create a Jira project for your company's investments..

2. Create a new problem type

Firstly, creating a new request type allows us to create specific fields, set up unique workflows, and easily search by issue type..

3. Set up a kanban board

Kanban boards show the flow of work through a process.

You can map each workflow status to a column on your kanban board. You can also set work in progress limits for ideation and progress to make sure the business isn’t focusing on too many things at once.

4. Create new investments

At this point, create some investments to populate your new kanban board. It is important to see your data on the board as it will be easier to compile and customize as you go.

5. Customize the dashboard

Now that you have a basic dashboard setup, executives and managers will want to know a few key metrics:

What's the problem?
What is the opportunity cost of the things we don't do?
What themes do we address as a company?
What is the roadmap for the coming period?

We can configure Jira Agile to display all this data.

With card colors, it is easy to determine where management should focus. Red cards stand out easily.

What is opportunity cost?

The most important items for the business should be at the top of the list. Work in progress encourages the team to be specific about moving new work into a work in progress status. If too much work is done at once, the company loses focus. If not enough work is done, the company is not using its resources in the most efficient way.

What's the problem?

Card colors are easy to distinguish what the problem is and projects on the board. With card colors, it is easy to determine where management should focus. Red cards stand out easily.

What themes are we working on?

Swimlanes in Jira Agile are a great way to group related work areas on a kanban board. We will use our custom theme area to separate related investments on the board. With swimlanes, you can easily see the progress of each theme on the board.

Make unlimited queries!

Quick filters or JQL queries go a long way in getting the most out of your agile card. The same concepts apply to the portfolio view.

Am I interested in the topic?

Everyone involved in the portfolio wants to see what is required of them. When looking at "Assignee", "Reporter" and "Sponsor", it is unlikely that one person will play multiple roles. Therefore, you only need one query to filter and track "Am I interested in the topic".

What is our roadmap?

With the deadline field, we can use quick filters to visualize our roadmaps. Using quick filters allows you to divide the in-progress column into quarters and also which investments can generate ideas. If you use the built-in Jira field, you can see all projects with a deadline due in Q4 2020.

6. Make Jira work for you

7. Do you want more?

Check out BIG PICTURE to help you enhance the look of your investment portfolio on Atlassian Marketplace

Summary

Jira scales to track enterprise portfolios to keep everyone on target. Portfolios have unique challenges that require many team members to work together to create a common solution. Jira and Jira Agile can help your organization highlight key areas of focus and provide transparency at the team level. Using and adapting these techniques in your organization will help everyone be more committed to company goals.

With Athena's expert technical staff and professional services,

...Choose the most suitable Atlassian applications for your organization,

...Adapt it to your business processes

...and start using it now...

Request Quote