Jira Align Reviews

We use Jira for scrum-related activity and 80 people use this solution within our company. 

In my current organization, there are limited features that we have adopted. In my previous experience, the Portfolio and Structure feature in Jira is really valuable because it assists with forecasting for projects. 

We have experienced errors with the internal server that occurs frequently. 

I have been using this solution for eight years. 

This is a stable solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

In my previous organization, I contacted the Jira support team for a particular feature and they suggested that we upgrade Jira because there was a bug in that particular version. After upgrading, the issue was resolved.

Jira offers very good GUI. The solution is easy to learn and there is a lot of functionality related to boards and project management-related activities that is offered. There is also good synergy between all the Atlassian products which is why we decided to switch to Jira. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten for pricing. The price of the solution depends on the number of people using it and the projects you are working on. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

I mainly use Jira Align for planning apps in the department.

Jira Align's most valuable feature is the view of strategic control reports for high-level directors.

Jira Align's setup process could be more straightforward, and they could make training and educational documentation more accessible. In the next release, I would like to see an improvement to the navigation system.

I've been using Jira Align for two to three months.

Jira Align is stable.

Jira Align is scalable.

Jira Align's technical support is good but limited - there are people in my department with more experience.

The initial setup was of medium difficulty, and I needed to find support documents to complete it.

I would give Jira Align a rating of nine 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.

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.

I have used Jira Align for project management. 

Jira Align improves working efficiency for every project manager or customer by providing utmost transparency. Project managers can easily obtain a comprehensive overview of tasks using Jira Align, and their working speed or efficiency drastically improves with the product. 

The interface of Jira Align is very easy to use and manage. In comparison, the interface of Microsoft Azure DevOps is complicated with too many items and options. 

The vendor should implement automation features in Jira Align. The solution should allow simple integrations with other applications like Microsoft Office. 

I have used Jira Align in our company projects. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. I haven't faced any service interruptions with Jira Align. 

It's a scalable product. 

In our company, we have received tech support for Jira Align. 

At our company, we didn't find Jira Align to be useful enough, so our company has presently migrated to a competitor tool known as Microsoft Azure DevOps. 

In our organization, we were previously deploying the solution on-prem, but in the past few months, it's been deployed on the cloud. 

At our company, we were concerned about the cost of Jira Align, which is expensive. 

I would rate the solution as eight out of ten. I would recommend every company working on Google Suite or open-source solutions use Jira Align. For small and medium-sized companies, Jira Align is a more suited product than large enterprises. 

We use Jira Align for service desk and backlog project management.

The product provides better logging and reporting, particularly for tracking changes and incidents. Service desk management has a straightforward process for handling incidents and problems. However, a notable challenge lies in managing multiple projects created by numerous stakeholders, which can lead to a lack of control and understanding of project purposes.

The product's most valuable feature is CMDB for services desk management and backlog projects.

Jira Align's cost needs improvement.

We have been using Jira Align for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a nine out of ten.

We are working on making the scalability more user-friendly for non-technical people. It is challenging for business users and requires some training. There could be specific documentation for stakeholders to understand the process.

We take help from a certified third party for technical support services. It needs improvement. They could provide a better contract agreement.

We take the assistance of a third-party partner to ensure proper support and project configuration. My role involves scrutinizing the impact of proposed changes or tools on our processes and workflows. I have to ensure that it aligns with organizational requirements.

We are getting help from a consultant and using in-house resources for implementation.

We can purchase the platform's yearly or quarterly subscription, depending on licensing packages. We have to utilize many add-on functionalities only available in the box. At the same time, most of the add-ons are free. We have to incur the cost of a few.

The platform's most valuable features for aligning teams with business objectives include its capacity to offer clarity on implementing ITIL methodology within the organizational framework.

We are planning to transition to Jira Cloud for better reporting. We are currently using the data center version with the eazyBI plugin, which has proven fairly usable, particularly in addressing reporting needs.

I recommend it for a development team. It is an efficient ITSM tool.

I rate it a seven out of ten.

We use Jira Align for standard agile use cases. 

The tool helps us with better tracking across various departments. Jira Align is highly valuable for organizations due to its flexibility. With my experience as an administrator, I can attest that it can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of any organization. It helps to eliminate the mess created by Excel spreadsheets. 

The product needs to improve its configurations. 

I have been working with the product for a year. 

I rate Jira Align's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is straightforward. 

Jira Align's pricing is reasonable. 

You need to start your evaluation with simple use cases. I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

The tool helps with product planning and strategic road maps. Unfortunately, it is too wedded to the quarterly planning model of the Scaled Agile Framework. If you want to do continuous planning, or plan work that spans multiple quarters, it's extremely difficult. You must artificially split work across quarters rather than, for example, start work in the last month of a quarter and finish the same work in the next quarter.  Also, dependency management is like throwing work over the wall.

It was a huge learning curve for dozens of teams. It didn't work, and we are abandoning the solution.

The product has good visualization capabilities and helps to see the different dimensions of a plan. 

The tool's corporate pricing is expensive.

Continuous planning is non-supported. Only the quarterly "PI Planning" model is available for many of the most useful road mapping features.  

Dependency management is like throwing work over a wall from one team to another and does not help with engineering-level orchestration of work in delivery.

I have been working with Atlassian products for six years. 

The product's stability is pretty decent. There are some issues when you try to integrate with Jira and Align. The data that goes back and forth creates data management issues due to delays in synchronization.

The product is scalable. 

The support goes through corporate support hence I didn't have much interaction with the support team. 

There was a negative ROI.

I would rate the product a two out of ten. 

I primarily use Jira Slight to perform agility at scale, a method where you connect businesses with operations, which helps connect the enterprise strategy to the operations. 

Jira Align's most valuable features are the roadmap, the program board, and the reports.

One area for improvement is that Jira Align's double menu and multiple menus can be difficult for new users. They could also improve their search function.

Jira Align is stable and improving all the time.

Jira Align is scalable, with special policies for licenses so you can have a lot of people using it.

Jira's technical support is really helpful, available, and quick to respond.

Positive

The initial setup can be straightforward, but it depends on the availability of Atlassian for technical support. The time required for deployment depends on the user's requirements, taking anywhere from one to six months.

Jira Align is quite expensive for small-to-medium companies, but it's quite reasonable for larger ones.

Jira Align is good for project owners and managers and Release Train Engineers because it offers them more visibility. I would recommend Jira Align for those with scale agile use cases and advise getting some training on the tool in order to get the best use from it. I would give Jira Align a rating of nine out of ten, as it's one of the best tools for scaling agile use cases.

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.