If your company is like ours, you’ve implemented agile development, partly because your teams crave the freedom and flexibility to work the way they want. But you’ve probably noticed that the larger your company grows, the harder it is to keep track of all the ongoing initiatives. Agile portfolio management tools like Portfolio for Jira can help you make sense of what’s going on across your teams and projects. If you’re asking yourself any of these five questions, consider giving it a try.
Agile portfolio management tools like Portfolio for Jira can help you make sense of what’s going on across your teams and projects. If you’re asking yourself any of these five questions, consider giving it a try.
1) What are teams actually working on and how do they contribute to the company’s goals?
An agile portfolio management tool will give you aggregated visibility across all teams, allow you to set business goals, and track progress toward them to make sure you execute on your strategy. It will also give everyone else on your team that same visibility so you can make sure everyone stays aligned and shares the same priorities.
2) How can we track dependencies between teams and projects?
T
An agile portfolio management tool will give you visibility across all these teams and projects and allows you to plan, manage and track dependencies at the story, epic and initiative level – so no surprises come up late in the development cycle that could have been easily avoided.
3 ) When can we deliver and are we are on track to hit our release dates?
If you feel like you’re flying blind to when you can actually release, or you’re doubting the forecasted release dates because you don’t trust the data, an agile portfolio management tool can help. It will dynamically forecast realistic release dates so you know when you can deliver and will allow you to optimize your schedule in real-time so you can see potential bottlenecks and react early, before they become a problem.
4) Who is on the critical path for the release, and where are the bottlenecks?
An agile portfolio management tool will help you plan more accurately by letting you manage team availabilities and skill sets so you can avoid bottlenecks and ensure the right people are available when needed.
5) Why are we spending hours creating status and progress reports?
W
An agile portfolio management tool that is directly connected to your teams work, and updates with changes and progress in real-time, will remove the pain and time associated with preparing progress reports for management.
Get visibility across all teams and projects with an agile portfolio management tool
When you need answers to the above questions, it’s time to start looking for an agile portfolio management tool that will help you balance team autonomy with stakeholder visibility. It’ll come as no surprise that we use Portfolio for Jira, which allows us to plan and forecast with confidence, make data-informed decisions when things change, and keep everyone on the same page. Oh, and with the new live plans labs feature, we can create a Portfolio plan in under a minute (and so can you).
Happy planning! 🙂
Did you find this post helpful? Share it on your social network of choice so your fellow agile portfolio leaders can check it out!