Agile Craft is an enterprise PPM solution for Scaled Agile Framework (aka SAFe). It was acquired by Atlassian in 2019 and rebranded to Jira Align.
While Jira Align is a comprehensive portfolio management tool, to adopt it, companies need to have a mature, unified SAFe process as well as a standardized Jira project setup and unified agile team process across the entire enterprise.
Implementing Jira Align typically requires a large-scale process transformation that often takes months of effort and costs over $1,000,000. These factors naturally reserve Jira Align to only mature, large enterprises without frequent changes.
When to Choose Jira Align or An Alternative?
If your organization:
- Is product-led or product-centric,
- needs to incorporate customer insights/ requests/ feedback,
- needs both portfolio capabilities and roadmapping capabilities,
- doesn’t practice SAFe “by the book,”
- has varied agile practices across teams, e.g. standard scrum, kanban, scrumban, or uneven sprints,
- has varied estimation practices across teams,
- is growing or changing team sizes and processes,
- wants a fast implementation and iterative rollout,
- uses multiple agile tools, and/or
- has a small PPM budget (way less than $1M)….
Then you need a Jira Align alternative.
Why Dragonboat’s Responsive PPM Tool is the Best Jira Align Alternative
Dragonboat is a responsive, modular, end-to-end responsive product portfolio management platform connecting OKRs, customer insights, product management, outcome tracking, and agile delivery.
Democratize Product Portfolio Management
Built with the secret, best practices of leading companies like PayPal and Netflix, Dragonboat is robust yet lightweight, economical, and only takes hours to get started. Easy to adjust or change, you can start using Dragonboat without making any changes to your process or tool stack.
The PPM tool stack of Dragonboat + Jira is similar to the Jira Align + Jira combination, where Dragonboat is for product portfolio planning, allocation, and alignment while Jira is for Agile execution. This forms a complete PPM solution from strategic alignment, allocation, to product and program; all integrated with team execution.
Work With Any Product Development Processes
SAFe, Scrum @scale, OKR + Agile, V2MOM + Agile, Lean product management, fuzzy planning (e.g. this month, this quarter, next quarter), or quarterly planning. Your product and program managers can easily pick up and use Dragonboat without changing their processes.
Support a Robust, Customizable 2-Way Integration with Jira, Github, Asana
Within the Jira integration, Dragonboat works well with Jira classic, Jira next-gen, Jira server, and Jira Advanced roadmap. Dragonboat also works with the traditional/ waterfall process. It only takes a few minutes to integrate.
Avoid Changing Your Existing Agile Process
Your teams may continue to work the way they have been, regardless of whether it uses standard scrum and sprints or scrumban, kanban, irregular sprints, with or without estimates, etc.
See real customer feedback on Atlassian Marketplace.
Enable an Agile Rollout
You may start Dragonboat for one team, then expand to a few more teams before rolling out to the entire organization (aka MVPC – minimum viable process change). Or if you’d like, you may even implement multiple instances of Dragonboat, all integrated with the same Jira for more process autonomy and faster adjustment by each team.
Save Money – Fewer Paid Licenses Needed
Because Dragonboat decentralizes team execution in Jira, the total number of licensed editors required is much smaller than what Jira Align requires.
Provide Visibility to the Whole Company Regardless of Jira Access
Embedded Dragonboat reports and its request portal kept in Confluence or an internal website provide product portfolio context and visibility to everyone in the company.
Close the Loop on Portfolio Outcomes
In addition to supporting OKR alignments, Dragonboat also supports outcome tracking to close the product portfolio loop and guide the prioritization and allocation for the next portfolio iteration.
A Flexible Jira Align Alternative PPM 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 product owned only the “what” and “why” of product building. They now must also collaborate on the “how,” “when,” and “who” in building robust products.
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.
Dragonboat can be implemented in minutes, not months, for thousands, not millions of dollars, and can be as flexible and dynamic as your team and process.
“Responsive Product Portfolio Management is needed by every product organization, regardless of whether you have 1 team or 100 teams. Dragonboat provides a responsive PPM platform for outcome-focused, dynamic companies.”
Rajesh, CPO, Nium
Dragonboat supports a complete responsive portfolio workflow from idea capture and organization, followed by responsive alignment and allocation of strategic goals/ OKRs and themes, as well as product prioritization, and collaborative planning to best design a portfolio roadmap for the next portfolio planning cycle. Once aligned and dependencies are cleared, product features are integrated to Jira for team execution and automatic roll-up reporting and progress tracking. Dragonboat also captures the outcome of the OKRs/ goals to influence the next integration of portfolio planning.
