Choosing a Product Portfolio Management (PPM) tool is a serious undertaking. And while adopting Jira Align may seem sensible if your team uses Jira software, it isn’t right for every organization. Below we provide tips for determining what is right for you and present a viable Jira Align alternative.
What Is Jira Align?
Agile Craft was an enterprise PPM solution for Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Atlassian acquired it in 2019 and rebranded it to Jira Align.
While Jira Align is a comprehensive portfolio management tool, to adopt it, companies must have a mature, unified SAFe process, a standardized Jira project setup, and an integrated agile team process across the entire enterprise.
Implementing Jira Align also typically requires a large-scale process transformation that can take months and cost over $1,000,000. These factors naturally limit Jira Align’s suitability to mature, large enterprises without frequent changes.
When to Consider an Alternative to Jira Align
How can you determine whether Jira Align is right for you? Ask yourself if any of the following statements are true about your organization.
- It is product-led or product-centric.
- Your team must incorporate customer insights, requests, and feedback.
- It requires portfolio and roadmapping capabilities.
- Your team doesn’t practice SAFe “by the book.”
- It has varied agile practices across teams, e.g., standard scrum, kanban, scrumban, or uneven sprints.
- Estimation practices vary across teams.
- The company is growing or rapidly changing team sizes and processes.
- Management wants a fast implementation and iterative rollout.
- You use multiple agile planning tools.
- You have a small PPM budget (way less than $1M).
If one or more of these statements pertains to your business, you need a Jira Align alternative, and Dragonboat might be the perfect option.
Why Dragonboat’s Responsive PPM Tool Is the Best Jira Align Alternative
Dragonboat is a modular, end-to-end responsive product portfolio management platform that connects OKRs, customer insights, product and project management, outcome tracking, and agile delivery. It is a great solution for companies of every size that must quickly grow and scale.
Dragonboat Democratizes Product Portfolio Management
Built upon the best practices of leading companies like PayPal and Netflix, Dragonboat is robust yet lightweight and economical. It only takes hours to get started, and there is no need to immediately change your process or tool stack because you can make adjustments as you go.
The PPM tool stack of Dragonboat + Jira is similar to the Jira Align + Jira combination, with Dragonboat for product portfolio planning, resource allocation, and alignment and Jira for Agile execution. It forms a complete PPM solution that can handle everything from strategic alignment and administration to product and program management, all integrated with team execution.
A Robust, Customizable 2-Way Integration with Jira, Github, and Asana
Within the Jira integration, Dragonboat works well with Jira classic, Jira next-gen, Jira server, and Jira Advanced roadmap. Dragonboat also integrates with GitHub and Asana and supports the traditional waterfall process.
You Don’t Have to Change Your Existing Process
Your teams can continue to work as before. Whether you use SAFe, Scrum @scale, OKR + Agile, V2MOM + Agile, lean product management, fuzzy planning (e.g., this month, this quarter, next quarter), or quarterly planning, product managers can easily pick up and use Dragonboat without changing their processes. Dragonboat supports standard scrum and sprints or scrumban, kanban, irregular sprints, processes with or without estimates, etc.
See real customer feedback on Capterra.
Dragonboat Enables an Agile Rollout
You can start Dragonboat for one team, then expand to a few more before rolling it out to the entire organization, taking a minimum viable process change (MVPC) approach. Or, you can even implement multiple instances of Dragonboat, all integrated with the same Jira instance, allowing for process autonomy and smoother adjustment by team members.
Save Money – Fewer Paid Licenses Needed
Because Dragonboat decentralizes team execution in Jira, it requires fewer licensed editors than Jira Align.
It Provides Visibility to the Whole Company Regardless of Jira Access
Use the embedded Dragonboat reports or its request portal (kept in Confluence or an internal website) to provide product portfolio context and visibility to everyone in the company.
Dragonboat Closes the Loop on Portfolio Outcomes
Besides supporting OKR alignment, Dragonboat provides outcome tracking to close the product portfolio loop and guide the prioritization and allocation efforts in the next portfolio iteration.
A Flexible Jira Align Alternative for Fast-Moving Companies
Increased digital processes, remote workforces, and changing consumer behavior have paved the way for a new breed of product leaders. Gone are the days when your product team only focused on the “what” and “why” of product development. Now, they must also collaborate on the “how,” “when,” and “who” in building robust products.
Today’s product teams are dynamic, cross-functional, and data-driven, so their tools must be too.
While a great option for traditional companies with established and static goals and processes, enterprise PPM tools, like Jira Align, require a high level of process maturity, intensive implementation, and a staff of Agile professionals to maintain.
You can implement Dragonboat in minutes, not months, and for thousands, not millions, of dollars. And it can be as flexible and dynamic as your team and process.
“Responsive Product Portfolio Management capabilities are needed by every product organization, regardless of whether you have 1 or 100 teams. Dragonboat provides a responsive PPM platform for outcome-focused, dynamic companies.”
Rajesh, CPO, Nium
Dragonboat supports your entire responsive portfolio workflow. Check it out for yourself with our free trial, or schedule a demo with one of our product experts.
