Alternative to Jira Portfolio

[Matthias Kannenberg]

I'm a big fan of the old Jira Portfolio (Live Plans) because it allows me to throw in all my tickets, resources, releases and priorities and gives me a realistic timeline without having to actually "plan" things by setting and tracking target dates.

Unfortunatly Atlassian decided to abandon all their USPs and the new Advanced Roadmaps version is lacking major features like default estimates, team member (not whole team) based utilization, role-down of changes and generally the ability to let the programm calculate a proper timeline without manually handling dates.

So I was wondering if there are other plugins for DataCenter installations which would do just that. I looked at some already but most seem to require estimations before tickets are concidered for planning (no default values) and some are little more then interactive gantt charts with little automation so all the planning has to be done by hand and any changes in the plan get either messy really quick, you have to go crazy with dependencies to enforce an order or the program simply does not care about capacity and overbooks the team to infinity.

How are others handling this, especially on a program or portfolio level? We are looking at migrating ~25 teams away from portfolio live plans and are looking for something that works both for individual teams to plan their work as well as for our program managers.

P.S.: Live plans work great for us, even on a program level over multiple teams. The only issue is that they are out of support for Jira 9 and this is the last showstopper we have to eliminate before we can migrate from Jira 8.

P.S.S.: Is Jira Advanced Roadmaps functionally abandoned? I haven't seen any meaningfull changes / updates for it since mid 2020. I'm aware that updates are now in the main Jira change log and not dedicated anymore but mentions of Advanced Roadmap are few and far between.

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

Hi @Matthias Kannenberg 

I'm Nataliya from the ActivityTimeline team. Taking into consideration your requirements it seems like our add-on could fit your request. 

ActivityTimeline offers features to help you plan out and schedule the workload for your team. Users have their own timeline as management. 

Tickets don't need an estimation, but for automation scheduling, it is required.

ActivityTimeline is more for Teams planning: you can plan in Team Panel first and then for individuals.   

The best way to discover the product - booking a demo. We can provide a demo session for you if needed. Or read about more features here.
Best, Nataliya 

[Katarina Harbuzava _ Planyway]

Hi @Matthias Kannenberg

I would definitely recommend trying Planyway team planner. Planyway has a robust project portfolio feature, that helps to have full control over multiple projects.

Planyway imports your Jira projects and allows you to visualize your workflow easier: Gantt-like timeline, resource planning, and finally project portfolio.

Keep working with Jira’s kanban board and Planyway views on the same screen. Add all projects you need in the left-side menu. After, you’ll see issues from all added projects on one calendar or timeline.

Track issues from multiple projects on any Planyway view but if you want to see them project by project, just click Group by project on the top of your timeline. Then, each project will get its own lane depicting all the workflow.

Your Planyway project portfolio can be easily filtered by member, label, status, and issue type, so you can narrow it down to more specific things.

Yes, it lacks some options, e.g. automatic estimations, and some planning has to be done by hand, but despite this, the plugin helps to visualize your workflow perfectly.

Planyway is available for Data Center, and it's free for 30 days for teams of all sizes. I hope it can help you somehow.

[Matthias Kannenberg]

Thanks for your suggestion Katarina!

While Planyway looks very cute and seems to be a one-stop-shop for the project needs of small to medium sized teams I did not really find any automated scheduling and all cards on the Gantt timeline are basically hand-placed, or am I missing something?

I'm looking for a tool that can take 10-20k tickets across my 25 teams and put them on a timeline automaticaly, based on the tickets priority/rank, available resources, releases and dependencies. The idea is that given all these information I get a realistic timeline automatically and can also see what happens if I make changes (like moving an epic to another release or adding two more people to one of the development teams).

From what I could gather quickly Planyway does not seem to have been designed for that level of scope, correct?

[Katarina Harbuzava _ Planyway]

Hello there!

Matthias, i am really sorry for the late reply.

If the Jira issues are assigned and there is a due date, then everything will be visualized on the timeline view.

But Planyway has no automatic arrangements/scheduling for free people based on priorities/ranks and dependencies. 

I hope, you will find your best tool.