JIRA and Portfolio integration

@MusungaK - We just start our adventure down this path and are utilizing Planview Hub to make the connection between Portfolios & Jira.  We have identified that in our project plans in Portfolios that Epics should be at a certain level and Stories at the next level down, this is needed for Hub. We state that Epics should be created in Portfolios first and then can push to Jira (although for other customers you have the flexibility to choose).  For stories, we configured our integration so that stories can be created in either tool and pushed to the other.  The great thing with Hub is that you are able to choose one direction or bi-directionally. Our hope is that our users see the benefit of this and we can scale this across teams. 

Also, with Hub, you can have multiple ways of working depending on different projects.  So if another business area comes to us and says they want to have Epics & Stories at a different level, and want something about that level to also sync across, we can configure another integration to support that business areas. 

Once you establish a connection between applications there is not an additional cost to create additional integrations.  The cost is about the connection needed. 

Hope that helps. 

Best regards,

Pam Sargent

@pamela.sargent Thank you and this is extremely helpful. We are beginning our journey down this type of integration and understating and knowing that it is flexible is good to know.

The bidirectional component is key for us and our initial requirements indicate setting up Epics and stories first in JIRA and pushing these down to Portfolios.

Is the integration live/instant or is there a delay when changes are made, and a process needs to be started to move the information?

Another questions, is the Work Item in Portfolio map to the Story level in JIRA

Regards,

Musunga

Thank you @pamela.sargent for the awesome response!

@MusungaK, Yes, Planview Hub can be used to integrate data between Planview Portfolio and Jira directly. You will be able to sync both entities on the Strategy Structure and the Work Structure to Jira artifacts. We typically recommend creating strategic initiatives (e.g. Portfolio Epics) in Planview Portfolio and sending it to Jira and then creating lower level artifacts in Jira to be sent back to Planview Portfolio.

Because Planview Portfolio handles financial planning, most customers don’t find the need to send stories into Planview Portfolio because that’s too granular of a level for financial planning.

One limitation of not having AgilePlace in between Planview Portfolio and Jira is that you will not be able to use Agile Costing. Currently Agile Costing requires AgilePlace in between Portfolios and Jira.

@MusungaK - The synchronization is not instantaneous but you can control how often it runs. Within the Hub integration configuration you set the timing for the ‘change detection’.  Hub says this is typically set to 1 min or 5 min. We have ours set a little higher for getting started as we are required to also have a coinciding job stream in Portfolios run so we did not want that job to run every minute as it can cause issues with other job streams. 

This may not be required for your environment as not all customers have to have this. It is dependent on the Portfolios configuration.  We have been using Planview since 2009 so did not have some of the newer OOB attributes, however we are investigating how to eliminate the need for this job stream.  

Joe was correct that stories are not typically sent over to Portfolios, however since we are not mature enough in our Agile processes our stories are not as low as they could be for others and our PMs want to have them in their project plans.  That’s the great thing about integrating with Hub, the flexibility to meet your company’s needs/processes. 

How we have our configuration is that we have a Project (PPL) in Portfolios.  The PM builds out their project plan which goes down to level 10.  We have Epics at level 9 and Stories at level 10. So Hub can sync and add the new entity at a level within a project plan, it does not have to be a new project.