Jira Align Reviews

We generally use it for reporting. It's to have transparency, to get to the incremental values. We do have value streams built up on Align and we get the metrics, how the program works, or the dependencies, not just between the teams, between the programs, or between the portfolios.

What you have in Jira are the scalability and the agile approach. It's all about getting to all the stakeholders or the enterprise users so that they can see what is happening from the bottom to the top or from top to bottom and how it's happening. 

When it's all other agile tools, you could just view what each team is doing, and how the work is delivered within the team. However, it is going above and beyond the teams. When you are doing a scaled agile, when it all involves the whole enterprise, you use the Jira Align. It's a combination when you try to do the scaled agile combining the teams, combining the programs, and combining the portfolios, that is when the Jira Align is of most use.

We use Jira Align on top of Safe 4.0 right now. They're not supporting Safe 5.0 yet, however, they are using it as VR; I used it on top of the framework as Safe 4.0.

We brought it for a very big program. Before that, everything was all silos. The teams were independently working and there was a lot of dependency from one team to another team, which was either tracked in Jira in the roadmap, and it was all over the place. Once we bought the two and tried to combine the teams, depending on what their objective is or what they're working towards, combine the teams and make them into our programs and combine the programs and make into our portfolios, what we saw was a huge value-add. It was transparency. You could see the vision, and the transparency is what was the most beneficial thing - that, and dealing with the dependencies.

.For example, if you have so many teams working towards one goal, not everything can be understood, done in silos. You have to group them in a value stream so they can work towards that one value, and even when they're working towards that one value, you would see a lot of dependencies between the teams and between the programs. Managing that and delivering that on time is what when we push it towards a scale agile with the Jira Align as the thing that holds everything together is what we saw most beneficial

Of course, after that, you would get further enterprise agility, business agility, et cetera, when you start using it more and more.

The objectives are good. If you do use a scale agile, the concept of moving objectives and moving your team's work towards the objective is what is going to give you the most value. You plan around the program increments. That's what the program is about. You plan around the program increments, you do the inspect the workshop, you do the retrospective and all those things. However, for example, when a stakeholder doesn't understand the feature, or they don't even care about it, yet they have an objective or a theme, they move towards it. It makes the objectives very clear, and very obvious.

When you try to move work where the stakeholders know what it is and what they're moving towards, at the same time, when you break down the work, the team can understand what they're working toward. A program manager would understand what they have to deliver in a particular timeframe. That kind of split, you could see. There's great visibility there. 

I really appreciate that Jira Align gives the concept or the functionality of what is called a work tree or a roadmap, which brings it all together and gives you a view of what the company or team is moving towards and who is contributing to what. The OKR experience is great.

There are fewer customization options in Jira Align due to how it was designed.

For example, in Jira, you can combine stories and you can create an epic. However, in Jira Align, they combine the stories and call them features you can combine features and call them capabilities. You can combine capabilities and call it epic. It's structured differently from Jira.

You just cannot buy Jira Align and just started using it. You can, however, the most beneficial thing comes when you start using Jira, and then integrate it with Jira Align, and bring in all the work done together as the actual work is done in Jira, and Jira Align is just a representation of that work.

It's the naming convention that everyone is struggling with. Jira is more widely used and has a bigger customer base. They shouldn't change the terminology if people need to use Jira in order to get the most out of Align and then have the two different naming designs. It's very confusing.

The UI needs work. We are part of the pilot team who are testing the new UI. Jira Align is trying to change the UI so that it is just like Jira. We didn't like it as the UI makes the functionality kind of change. If you have never used Jira Align and you are a brand new customer who used Jira, the sales pitch would go better.

There are lots and lots of reports and it's very hard to understand exactly how we can use all of them. It's quite dense. They need more documentation.

I started using the solution in 2020.

They have done a lot of work fixing bugs and making all types of enhancements. They are working to make everything more functional for agile. 

The stability is very good. Our company was very mature and they have 800 programs in it and ten big portfolios. Jira Align does handle everything with no issues. We don't often have big performance problems. However, for example, if you try to load the roadmap for one big portfolio, it does take time. That is understandable as it's loading huge amounts of data. Other than that, it is actually good.

It is very good at scalability. It's not complete scalability, however, Jira getting integrated with Jira Align is great and it scales that way. If Jira Align is open to getting integrated with other team levels, and managing the work tools, then it would be easier. Right now, to use the Jira Align, either you have to use it as a silo, or you should have Jira in the backend. You cannot have other tools. A lot of enterprises would have other Azure tools or Microsoft tools, from which they manage the team's data, and they would be hesitant just to move to Jira Align as they are using some other tools which cannot be integrated. 

Right now, we have more than 5,000 users on the solution. On Jira, we likely have more than 20,000 users. Not everybody needs to be on Jira Align. It is being used extensively, however.

The support was good. They recorded all of the training sessions, for example. They really helped us learn the tool early on and were very supportive. 

In terms of ongoing support, we do have weekly calls where we go over support tickets, issues, bugs, et cetera. We have regular productive TAM meetings. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

I was not part of the deployment. That said, looking at it, it seems to be very user-friendly and would not have been a hard setup. I'd rate it a four out of five in terms of ease of setup.

The deployment took more than two months. It's not full-time and we didn't rush through it. We didn't do it enterprise-wide either. We had a lot to consider and we were being strategic. Likely, if you were aggressive, you could do it in a couple of weeks. For us, bringing in the scale agile concept did take a lot of time. Once we figured that out, there was just connecting and creating and mapping the states and all of that was pretty straightforward. There's pre-work to be done, however, it's worth it to take your time. 

We do have a solution architect from Atlassian that helped us with the setup. It wasn't a hand-in-hand implementation. there were training sessions. 

The person who helped us and ran the training was very supportive and very pleasant to work with. What they taught us via training was about Atlassian, however, the setup was so specific to our company, that without having an extensive background in our organization, they really didn't have the capacity to go beyond training. We'd have questions like "what if we did this, or that?" and they would have to circle back to a program manager to get the answers. That said, they did cover all of the topics. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing. 

We are customers and end-users.

We are using the most recent version of the solution. We're using an enterprise edition cloud.

I'd advise users, if they have Jira, to just go for Jira Align. Just start off with a small number of full licenses. You don't need to have a lot of full licenses just to implement Jira Align. With us, we could actually see what's happening in the organization. The silos disappeared. People can see deliverables and objectives more clearly. It helps bring a lot of motivation.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten, having never used any other enterprise agility tools.

Mainly, we use the solution to maintain our backlogs, scrum processes, and project management. So, we create the entire structure. It is a brief project management tool. Regarding backlog management, the solution includes features apart from using the product for the product backlog, sprint planning, experiments, and defect management.

Jira Align is an intuitive tool that features a roadmap view. This allows users to see the entire program they have set up, following sprint planning. The portfolio summary view provides a user-friendly interface for operational users such as the scrum team, the scrum master, and the product team. In addition, it provides a management dashboard for leadership to monitor progress. The tool enables viewing the entire roadmap for an epic, and users can drill down to the lowest level, the product backlog item.

My company is in the process of moving out from Jira Align. We are planning to transition to another tool called Planisware. Though there are no issues with Jira Align, Planisware offers its users a complete package in terms of portfolio management. Jira Align fails to provide its users with a complete package in terms of portfolio management. In short, Planisware offers many different facilities making it a more comprehensive tool. In a company, we can use Planisware for resource management, especially at a portfolio level. Though it is expensive in terms of licensing, our company has decided to move to Planisware.

I have been using Jira Align for five years. I don't remember the version I am using currently.

We have around 500 users using this solution in our organization. In our company, we are using the solution extensively. Also, we do not plan to increase the number of users since only specific people in our organization use the solution.

In our company, we have a different team who deals with Jira's technical support team.

Previously, we used Azure DevOps in our company. Azure DevOps was earlier known as VSTS. Also, we still use this tool in our organization. So, we use Azure DevOps for all our product backlog items and overall product backlog management at a lower level. We use Jira Align to manage epics and features.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Its setup process is not complex since it's an intuitive tool.

I don't remember how long it took to deploy the solution in our organization since we started using it around four years ago. We did not face any issues during its deployment phase. Regarding the deployment model, I would say that we are using the solution on the cloud. Also, I won't be able to explain the steps involved in the deployment process since a different team did it a long time ago. We have a team of around three or four three members to manage the deployment and maintenance process.

There are two types of maintenance processes. In pure maintenance, if you have an issue with the tool, then you raise a ticket, after which you work with Jira's support team to resolve the issue. And the second type of support that you require is from people who understand the technicalities of the tool and know where to set up certain things in the tools that can get the tool to provide privileges, user access management, and identity management. In our company, we have various pillars. So, each pillar will have a small team of one or two people. There will be a team of those providing support to the people in a particular team on how to use the tool, especially if there is any required setup or administration-related activities. Since it is not our tool and we weren't involved in the coding process of the solution, we need to reach out to Jira if we come across any defects or need to make any customizations in the tool. So, we formed a small team of two or three members to look into such issues and needs.

Jira Align is definitely worth the money.

Even though my company has an enterprise license for Jira Align, I am unaware of the solution's pricing.

I recommend the solution to those planning to go for agile project management since it has all the features. We use Azure DevOps and Jira Align in our company. A lot of maintenance happens if you have multiple tools. So, sticking to one tool is better. So if one has Jira Align, one should develop everything in Jira. However, Jira Align doesn't have code management in it. One should choose only one solution between Jira Align and Azure DevOps as an agile project management tool. Sticking to either one of the tools for a specific or particular project is better. There have been instances when a certain tool does not support a waterfall project model. In our case, we get involved in many deployment activities using different tools. Taking one tool into consideration, it might have limitations. Hence, a person needs to understand the nature of the project before selecting the tool and using the same one for the entire project. In short, it is better not to use Jira for everything since it is meant to be used only for those things for which it was developed. Using multiple tools might create syncing issues or integration issues for its user.

If you use Jira Align for agile project management, you will undoubtedly have a better user experience and more capabilities. On the other hand, if you choose to use Azure DevOps for the same purpose, you may have to make some compromises since it cannot manage agile projects as effectively. However, Jira Align is the recommended solution if you have a larger project with several integrated components and require portfolio summary or roadmap features. Azure DevOps can be a good choice for smaller projects that do not require much visibility. For instance, if there are several MVPs like, let's say, there is a road map of three years for a product. In such a case, Jira works out better from a project management perspective. If you have a support project where you mainly use Kanban or require an operational perspective without the need for extensive visibility for senior management, Azure DevOps is a suitable tool. This is especially true if there are more operational users on the tool than management users. The choice between Azure DevOps and Jira Align will depend on the type of work being done, project size and complexity, number of people involved, levels of management using the tool, and cost considerations. Since enterprise licenses are typically negotiated, Microsoft may offer better pricing due to its existing Microsoft 365 OS license. It is important to make an informed decision by considering the project requirements and ease of tool management.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We're creating a centralized place for our stakeholders and sponsors to have shared access to project details. 

My partners are normally the architects, engineers, and product owners. I work as a senior project manager and program manager. I have the scrum role added to me when we don't have any since I'm a scrum master too. I've been on the engineering side as an engineer, like onboarding and monitoring and creating all the meetings, and meeting with our customers more. I'm able to use Jira to help facilitate tasks related to various projects.

It's easy to set up.

The solution is user-friendly, and it's very easy to use once you go through the guidebook. There's lots of great documentation. 

We can integrate with other solutions, like Azure, GitHub, Slack, et cetera.

I am really focused on identity access management and getting access to the vendors. Right now, I'm setting up vendor access through Azure. You can do that or with the IAM.

Sometimes we have to create several different types of access because we have vaulted databases. We have the Unix databases, I have MySQL, and we have Mongo, where I get access to those user classes or to the databases in the host group. Those are all different access scenario forms that I submit after I do the configuration in the form with the security team. I need clarity on the IAM.

I'm not clear on PAM eighter. Is there a form that they have to submit to get access to the internal cyber-risk teams to get their access for people to be able to use the tool on the Confluence side? Do they have to send some kind of form to the operation's security or enterprise security? To be able to get the access for privileged access, do they need to be working on projects that have vaulted databases? I still need to figure out how that works. 

Other companies that are competitors of Jira and Confluence, are able to create their active directories for the vendors that don't come in internally. They only do access through the cloud and through third-party, two-factor identification. That's something I was wondering if that was already implemented in the packages, the package for Confluence. It would be nice to have that right in the solution.

I've used the solution since 2016.

The solution is stable. We use it with GitHub a lot and it works fine. 

I basically have never had to deal with support. I've only internally asked for assistance. Usually, it's the Microsoft person or whoever the administrator is. We use Slack or Microsoft Teams that are interfaced with those tools as well, and when we need help, we go through those solutions.

We have it all in a channel where we customize our teams, and then we have all the channels for whoever we need to reach out to for Atlassian. If we have Jira Confluence or Azure issues, we just reach out to the Microsoft person, one guy we all know can assist.

We were trying to use Microsoft Teams to centralize everything. However, we only track our actions and our action items, and our issues and risks.

Microsoft Teams now does have a template I create through an Excel template I upload. 

I usually managed only the Jira side, not really the Microsoft side.

It's pretty simple to set up and start using the solution.

Usually, I go in and look at the functions and options, and usually, I create my project teams more in Jira and Confluence as well. Then I start creating whatever epics I need. I start creating my boards, what we're going to create, to my backlog first and then the parent, the backlog, and the sub-criteria. I'm not really working with these tools on all my projects since not all of my customers are working with these tools.

I pay for the service every month. 

I only get billed for the services I use. I don't know what it costs internally from a corporate perspective, as it has to be used when they buy the package itself. Therefore, I don't know the cost from a corporate perspective, I only know from the way I use it. I just purchase the licensure, and then they bill me directly and invoice me monthly.

I've been getting invoices since 2016, and I started off at a higher cost, and now I find the price to be lower. 

I have it on my phone. I'm doing testing. With Jira, you get billed when you're working as a freelancer or a consultant. I get billed monthly as an invoice, so I have to go and test their new functions and features monthly. When you have the licensures, you must touch the application, the system.

If you're used to working in GitHub or when you're working with engineers, they tend to have their own version one tools. Jira is good for working well with GitHub and has been since the beginning. Jira has gone ahead and created functional user roles for each user that is going to use the tool.

Potential users should understand that they have options. 

I had someone demo everything with me back in 2016. And then, I had someone demo the updated features for Trello. They can really dig in and show you some interesting features. Learn the business side, the process side, how to use it, and what it can do, and you'll be better off when you start.

I love Jira and Atlassian products. As a matter of fact, I promote them. That said, I'm also promoting all of Azure and Microsoft and your products as well. I'm taking the training for both Atlassian and Azure for the cloud. Right now I'm doing all of the certification training right now. 

Make sure that when you're using the Jira side, that you're using Jira for the backlog and creating the product. In Jira, we create the product backlog and the backlog for prioritizing the work we're going to do. Then for the Confluence side we assign to an administrator that manages the site period, the platform's governance that provides the access to all of us. That's more the Confluence side.

I use Jira more for managing projects or creating the product charter. 

Then we implement all our artifacts and documents in a centralized place. We add our iterations. 

Everybody needs to use Jira always on their projects. I'd rate it ten out of ten.

We are primarily managing larger portfolios. In this case here, I'm currently with a bank and this solution is used for larger portfolios of initiatives that are current within the bank. From there we're determining the course of action as it pertains to the work that is then performed by the individual departments.

Before we had no ability to even manage projects that we ran in Jira. These are software projects, including infrastructure work, and now everything is happening in one tool. The ability to use Jira Align now to bring these projects into a common portfolio is something that we otherwise had to do with spreadsheets prior to this.

There’s definitely the ability to manage larger initiatives that go across multiple projects. Otherwise, Jira in itself does not allow you to go across projects. You really have to manage several projects, however, you have nothing that aligns with them. You have to have Jira Align on top of Jira to have that capability.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

Maybe some of the terms and the connectivity could be improved. Jira Align in Jira, they share common fields in order to be aligned. These could be improved. Sometimes alignments are missing or they just disappear and we have to reestablish them.

I’ve been using the solution for two years now.

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze. The performance is good.

So far, the solution has been quite scalable. We haven’t had issues in that regard.

In our organization, Jira Align users are limited to about 25 people. In the case of Jira users, there are about 300, roughly.

There are plans to increase usage. It is, right now, used across most of the organization, although the teams have not adapted all processes, all Agile processes, yet. There will be continuous improvements as we go forward.

We’ve been very pleased with technical support so far. They have been helpful and responsive.

I also use Rally Software.

Similarly, since Jira and Jira Align are more intuitive., we prefer them Particularly, Jira is more widely used than, for example, Rally. Blueprint was a niche market product that really covered different aspects of the work. In this case, how do you manage individual documentation that you want to manage as part of a single project? That would be an enhancement to Jira, for example. Rally simply was just less intuitive.

The initial cost, particularly for Jira Align, appears to be higher. In the end, even Rally did not offer all functionalities unless you were including other products that were needed to perform the same function, therefore, the cost became equivalent.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward.

I was not directly involved in the deployment and therefore can’t get into how long the process took or what specifics were involved.

The solution, in terms of maintenance, is handled outside. It is a fairly small team of maybe five people.

The setup was done in-house with the assistance of a vendor.

Overall, we're satisfied with the process. We did have some scenarios where work was assigned, where work was aligned with an individual's account, and when that person left, we were not able to access that one. However, that was more on the administrative side and those were unknown facts to us at the time.

We’ve seen an ROI. Since we prior did not really have a good solution and even prior solutions, were much more complex and less intuitive. When we used the product, we definitely saw an improvement. Some of the work continued to be managed in spreadsheets, which are now maintained in a single set of tools. We definitely saw at least 20% to 30% in work experience improvements, time management, and the simple ability to reduce waste time due to generating reports. Externally updating spreadsheets, we saw a lot of improvements in the way how we operate.

I don't have the licensing cost, however, I know Jira Align is much more expensive than Jira. I don't have the numbers as I don't know what the enterprise agreement is.

The operating costs would be there still, as you do need a team that has a general understanding of the application so the operational cost has to be included when considering what the total costs would be.

We are using whatever the latest version of the solution is. I don’t know the exact version number. We managed it as a SaaS. It’s managed by a vendor.

Jira and Jira Align are for larger development organizations and organizations that need to manage the portfolio work in a single tool are definitely a viable option.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten. If you were to compare the solution with Rally, I’d rather use this and Jira together.

Our primary use case is for running agile sprints, for our weekly planning, task tracking, assignments, milestones, and reporting. I also use the burndown charts, velocity measurements, and developer productivity. We are customers of Jira.

I like the solution's ability to create a backlog and in the latest version, the epic view is very useful, you're basically creating a backlog and then dragging and dropping into the sprint. It's very cool. I also like the velocity and the reporting which provides good visibility, burndown charts, and particularly velocity measurement. I've found their email integration very useful and they have a configurable way of adding attributes. They have some of the mandatory fields, some of which are more advanced. The solution has an easy learning curve with the good documentation they provide. For power users, it's very useful.

One aspect that could be improved is that a ticket is declared as completed only when it is in the last column of the Jira board, regardless of the state it's in so that completed tickets don't get picked up because it goes by column rather than status. It's an annoying feature of Jira which they could improve. They could also add additional reporting capabilities. If I want to look at a graph of the performance and progress of a particular developer, I can't do that. GitHub gives a lot of good statistics on developer activity, productivity, and I'm not getting it here. It would be a useful thing to have. 

Another feature I would love to have is an inline ticket creation from the  board. Right  now, I have to move to backlog, create ticket and then come back. 

I've been using this solution on and off for the last 10 years.

There are no issues around stability. Solution is available as a software as a service. I have not faced any outages or bugs which affect our work so far. Its been fairly stable. 

I haven't had any performance issues in terms of scalability. We only have 10 users and it's working well. I know Jira is also used by enterprise organizations, so I don't think scalability is an issue. 

I have used FreshRelease and Rally before. When I moved on, I had several options and found Jira hosted by atlassian to be the most viable solution for our startup. It works well so I'll stick with it. key point was it was integrated well with other tools used by us. 

The initial setup was straightforward, it's available over the web browser so there's no installation, it's just a matter of registering. The whole thing would have taken an hour maximum. It's pretty seamless. 

well, clarity in terms of what we need to do this week. This reduces friction and translates into velocity and productivity. 

The cost is $3 per user. So I'm paying $24 for eight users. We're just having an issue with the license flipping back to a free plan each week and I need to raise a ticket on that. Otherwise, it's seamless. 

Have used other solutions in the past. Jira was chosen because it seemelssly integrated with bitbucket and confluence and provides an integrated collaboration environment. 

Jira is great for small and enterprise organizations. I highly recommend it for startups. Another benefit is that Atlassian gives me Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello, they're a useful stack. I can use Jira for project management and agile management, Confluence for content collaboration, Bitbucket for code repository management and Trello can be used for a daily to-do list. It's all integrated. Atlassian has the key advantage of having been in the market for a long time.

I rate the product nine out of 10. 

We use the solution for schedule management and to do any updates on projects that we have had. I am a project manager and our organization put together a portfolio for each of us to have our own set of projects listed specifically under Jira that we had to provide regular daily updates for.

This solution helped our organization by allowing us to do customizations easily for our fast-paced team environment.

The most valuable features are the ability to customize the entries and to update them quickly. Since the new version they released, we started utilizing the customization features to create specific codes and symbols for our teams that were not available before. For example, in team A each person had their own symbols and we had our own demarcation. When our project or task was completed, we had a code that we could enter online that let the main project managers know that it was time to remove it.

One of the biggest issues I found in the new version was once we clicked on one of the tasks that were specifically for our group and went to look at the other portfolios in other areas we had to browse all the way back to the beginning. If you click the back button, it would not work, it stayed the same place. Additionally, if you click on page B, but then you wanted to go back to page A it would not go back to page A. You would have to browse back to the portfolio and then find your group again and open it.

This was the only issue that I had with it and I am not sure if it is a Jira issue or it was because of the way the site was laid out.

I have been using Jira Align for approximately four years.

The solution is very stable. We had one issue but I cannot say if it was because of the network that we were on or if it was a limitation of the solution. Everything else about the solution was stable. The only time it was down was when our administrators announced they were going to take it down.

The scalability is good because when we started utilizing the solution we only had three teams and three different sections then from December to January the developers came together and it expanded to 76 different tasks across the teams. When we hit February we had over 300. It is easy to expand and it did not only encompass our teams but also had links to other teams that were outside of our main sets of teams.

Our whole agency was using the solution which is approximately 100 people.

When I sent an email out to the technical support I received a couple of answers back. I would say their technical support is good.

When I had to set up my own pages, it was quite easy. I had an enjoyable time creating my own test pages and it allowed me to change many features and test out the different settings. It was very easy to import new documentation and attachments and to set up sub-pages for our team to check in to Jira Align.

It was a large-scale effort for the implementation of the solution and there were three main supervisors overseeing the operation. We have a total of 12 administrators maintaining this version of Jira Align. 

I have evaluated ServiceNow.

My advice to others is this is a good solution and if you have multiple teams as we did that require you to provide daily updates then it is the ideal choice. You can track every entry and you can see when it is inputted by a timestamp. If you have a lot of mission-critical or time-sensitive activities, Jira is good for tracking and helping to keep everything organized.

This is an excellent solution and has great functionality.

I rate Jira Align an eight out of ten.

The epic linking part is the most valuable aspect of the solution. Of course, the story point where we give and it really gets displayed in the scrum board. It helps us a lot.

The reporting structure is great. It has a good burndown chart. Those are really good.

It's quite straightforward to set up. It's very user-friendly.

Support responds very quickly.

I remember in my previous engagement, there was a plugin we enabled to add features. One is the epic, and then comes the feature, and then comes the user story. If you go with the standard version, you have an epic and try to do a user story. I also remember we used the feature using a plugin in the previous project. If that can be made available not as a plugin but as a standard way of doing things. That feature kind of category is missing.

What happens with the plugins, is that not every customer will agree to install a plugin. Some are paid and they come back asking, "Why do you need this plugin? You have to pay an extra cost." Rather, if you make it as a built-in functionality, it would be better. It should be part of the standard solution, not as a plugin.

There is some capacity planning kind of a feature out there. I tried to use it, however, it was really not clear how to use it, how it gets reflected and all. It would be helpful if they had something for capacity planning that was simpler to understand. 

I've used the solution for six or seven years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

If there is any scale from one to five, it's really good. I would give it five out of five.

The entire team uses the Jira board. The scrum master or the project manager is given additional privileges to configure the swimlane, configure the team, and all those things. 

We are given an email ID. I'm not a Jira admin, however, I am an owner of a few projects within the Jira in the customer instance. However, whenever there is an issue, we do send out an email. Ultimately, internally, it is aligned to one of the Atlassian support people. I have hardly seen them taking more than an hour or two to get back to us. 

Recently, we had an instance where the Jira was completely down, and we were worried about all the stand-up calls, how to run, them, et cetera. However, within an hour, it was all back up and running again. The support is good. they are very quick.

The initial setup is easy to set up. It's not complex or difficult. 

There is not too much maintenance needed.

The deployment is completely outside of Jira, except for putting it up for tracking purposes. No integration is done from Jira itself to handle any deployment activities.

I don't have visibility of the cost.

We have our own instance of Jira. That is not used for any customer project. It's more for our internal. When I work for a customer, the customer has their own instance and there is a license and we use their Jira. We don't expose our internal Jira instance to any of them unless they want to pay for a license and set up their board, which no customer would do.

We have a licensed version. It's the latest version, definitely. However, I haven't really checked it and therefore don't know the exact version number. On the customer sites, I don't have any information as to what version they use. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I'm a Jira application architect, and I support a major client. They use Jira Align to connect the business strategy to the work that's being done by the delivery teams. I adapt and implement the tool that supports their business processes. Sometimes I'm a release train engineer where I plan the work that's being done by multiple teams.

Being able to do PI planning, using the program levels is most valuable. I find that the program-level reporting is most useful.

However, I believe that each user would answer the question differently as it's a complex software used by many users. 

I would like to see Jira Align merge and integrate better with Jira as a whole. A lot of the time, the data from Jira won't map very well into Jira Align.

This tool is very stable.

This tool is very scalable. 

We have 5,000 people using this tool.

We pay a lot of money for them to provide support. I would rate their support a five on a scale from one to five.

Positive

The implementation is a little complex and took six months.

I deployed it onto a machine and installed it. The installation doesn't take too long because it is hosted by the vendor. However, the configuration of the tool does take a long time. I've been working on it for two years and I'm not done yet because more and more portfolios and teams are onboarding. 

This product is expensive.

Your business will need to understand the transformation as they are transforming into an agile business. Once you know that the transformation training is on track, then you can use this tool. If it is not on track, then the tool is not going to provide any real help. It is important to understand how you will adopt this tool.

I would rate Jira Align an eight out of ten. It is a pretty effective and powerful tool, but you will need to know what you're doing and the implementation to support your business is challenging. Part of the challenge comes from the fact that businesses are risk overt. People are afraid of failure and tend not to change, but if they are looking for a new tool I would suggest Jira Align, as it is very effective and helpful.