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 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.

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.

AI is utilized worldwide; they could implement the functionality for notifications and other organizational operations in the product. It would be beneficial in planning, issues tracking, and setting reminders.

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.

The product should improve its communication. My English proficiency is not high, but writing in English is another skill that you need. Maybe AI can help here. Because I can see in some other applications, they have AI helpers. So when you write something and you want to do something, it can help. For example, Google Cloud Platform has it. They have a helpdesk for it. When you want to create a cluster, it can help you. 

One area where Jira Align could be improved is mobile accessibility. Right now, it is mostly for laptops, but it would be more user-friendly if it had a mobile-friendly interface. This way, senior management and others could easily check progress on their mobile devices when they are not using a computer.

The solution needs to improve its pricing. It also needs to provide an integrated view of how other tasks are to be tracked. It would be also useful to see the integration of Confluence, Teams, and Slack into the product. I want to be able to communicate directly with others while using the product. I am also not sure if the integration of third-party alternate workflow tools like SAP would be possible. 

I've encountered limitations in using Jira Align for certain aspects, particularly in implementing OKRs. Jira Align's highest hierarchy is Epic, which may not always align perfectly for specific initiatives. Additionally, while Jira Align offers functionality for tracking OKRs and generating dashboards, I've found that it lacks in some areas. As a result, we've explored alternative solutions that better meet our needs in these areas. Its Kanban feature is also limited. 

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.

For future releases of Jira Align, I would suggest making workflows simpler and more user-friendly. It would be helpful to have improved tools for visualizing workloads and an easier way for users to collaborate with administrators to streamline complex workflows. Simplifying communication and customization, especially for managing bulk storage and intricate projects, would enhance the overall user experience.

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.

It takes a lot of time to maintain the product. There were a lot of changes in our environments during the day. Using the tool might have been more convenient and productive if we did not have hundreds of different environments. The tool must provide better bulk editing features. It must provide more flexibility to make a wide range of changes to many things at once.

For an ITSM tool to be maximized in an organization, it should be tailor-fitted. Unfortunately, some are not good at programming these applications. For example, we've used Jira for some time but never configured the SLA. It depends on the person who is programming the software.

When it comes to a weakness, I don't know if Jira provides training for people who want to be certified with the solution, so that is one of the problems. We depend on the vendor, and the vendor doesn't have enough time to support us, so we need training from Jira.

ServiceNow has a lot of resources. So that may be the game changer there.

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

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.

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. 

In my company, we found the solution to have many issues regarding its ability to handle claims and other processes since the solution is not available on a single window. The solution needs to be more simplified and should have more integration capabilities.

In my company, we found that the solution has a lot of integration problems between the communication channel and other related areas, because of which we cannot find any dashboards to connect directly from our client. It is difficult to integrate Jira Align with other products. We currently use Smartflo for communication purposes offered by Tata Tele Business Services since we want to integrate it with Jira Align to get our toll-free number as 1800. We face issues because of the integration problems between Jira and Smartflo. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement in the solution.

In the future, Jira Align should integrate and include an Indian toll-free number in its communication channel.

An area of room for improvement is related to Jira Align's simplicity. Someone who is new to Jira or doesn't have many years of working experience in Jira Align gets easily lost because everything looks the same in the product. The navigational and other workflow features in Jira Align aim to provide ease of use that sometimes creates difficulty for a newcomer or someone new to Jira to get to know where they are once they are in the system. In Jira Align, the navigational feature or the ability to cross over to each screen should be made more precise, and then it would be much more helpful for someone new to Jira.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

Jira Align should reduce the many information fields we need to provide while closing defects.

Jira Align should improve the ease of use for developers.

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.

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. 

The product needs to improve its configurations. 

The initial setup was a little bit complex. It involved many things.

The framework could be better.

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.

There is no linkage between the Jira records and the overarching schedule. We maintain the overarching schedule in Microsoft Project, and there is no linkage back and forth with the Jira tasks. They are independent of each other.

Jira Align's cost needs improvement.

Jira Align can improve the visibility of executive teams.

Jira Align's user interface needs improvement because its user experience is really bad. It takes around a week to onboard any team member in Jira Align because it has a lot of nuances. The materials used to go through the Jira Align tool are time-consuming and academic. I have used Jira Align for eight years, but I had to keep doing many things with Jira for at least three months to understand everything.

Jira Align doesn't recommend anything. Jira Align should improve its AI offerings because it currently has zero AI. The solution's release notes, user stories, and templates are far more boring.

The workflows are scalable from portfolio to individual level but can sometimes be complex to navigate.

The synchronization between Jira and Jira Align takes too long and that is something that they could work on. 

I have not had any issues with Jira Align.