Jira Align Reviews

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

I primarily use Jira Align for agile.

The framework could be better.

I've had no issues with Align's stability.

The license for Jira Align is priced fairly.

I would rate this solution nine out of ten.

Jira didn't do the portfolio very well, so the use case was trying to do the work with multiple teams. Jira couldn't do that out of the box.

The linking of PI Objectives with different features was one of the cool things. It had features, epics, and stories out of the box. 

It should just have the integration with Jira. We haven't looked at it since Atlassian bought the product.

I had a little bit of experience with it when we tested it. We just did a review of it while trying to compare three products.

We dealt with some folks over there. I can't remember who we worked with there. Their support was really good because they were trying to sell us the product. They were trying to get a procurement, so they were really nice, but I can't say about the support after the product purchase.

We compared AgileCraft, Rally, and ALM Octane. We decided not to go with AgileCraft because of the expense of doing it.

I would rate AgileCraft a seven out of 10.