Short answer: To move a plan from Jira Plans into Portfolio by HeroCoders, use the Plan Migrator. Go to Apps, select the three dots next to Portfolio, open App Settings and choose Plan Migrator. Then tick the plans you want to move and click Migrate selected. Each plan comes across with its scope, exclusions, columns, groupings, sorting, hierarchy nesting, sharing and plan owner intact.
That's the whole migration. Next comes the part Jira Plans was never really built for: seeing who on your team actually has room for the work.
Try Portfolio by HeroCoders for free now.
Why move a plan out of Jira Plans at all?
Jira Plans is a solid cross-team planning tool, and if you're on Jira Premium or Enterprise you already have it. Plenty of teams use it for timelines and scenario planning and are perfectly happy.
Teams usually start looking elsewhere when the questions change. "What's on the roadmap?" turns into "Who's overbooked next month?", "Which epics are going to slip?" and "Do we have someone with the right skills free in March?"
Those are the questions Portfolio by HeroCoders is built to answer:
- Capacity Alerts and Delivery Alerts. Portfolio flags overbooked assignees, and work items whose dates don't add up. Jira Plans doesn't have either alert.
- Capacity at the individual level. Jira Plans plans capacity team by team. Portfolio’s Capacity Planner works person by person, takes each person’s holidays and time off into account, and lets you group people by User, Team, Role or Project.
- Skills, roles and resource requests. In Portfolio, you can plan demand by role and skill before you put a name against it. Jira Plans doesn't do this.
- More ways to look at the same work. Portfolio has Table, Graph, Treemap and Pie Chart views, plus a Gantt chart in the Advanced edition.
Portfolio's capacity planning and portfolio views also work on Jira Free and Standard, not just Premium and Enterprise, so they don't depend on your Jira plan.
For the full side-by-side, see Portfolio by HeroCoders vs Jira Plans: Complete Feature Comparison.
For a long time, switching came with one annoying cost: you had to rebuild every plan by hand. The Plan Migrator removes that cost, so moving to Portfolio feels like a step forward rather than another project to manage.
What the Plan Migrator copies across
Eight parts of each plan come with it:
- Scope: the work the plan covers.
- Exclusions: anything you'd deliberately left out.
- Columns: the fields you'd chosen to see.
- Groupings: how you'd organised the rows.
- Sorting: the order you'd put things in.
- Hierarchy nesting: how work sits under its parents.
- Sharing: who the plan was shared with.
- The plan owner.
In other words, you don't have to remember which JQL you used eighteen months ago, or who was supposed to have access.
The one limitation to know about
Plans that combine multiple source types can't be migrated yet. If one of your plans pulls in work from more than one kind of source, you'll need to set it up in Portfolio yourself for now.
That doesn't take long. You can define a portfolio's scope with JQL, or with simple filters such as spaces, assignees, work item types, status categories and dates, plus many more.
How to migrate a plan, step by step
- In Jira, open Apps from the left navigation, select the three dots next to Portfolio and choose App Settings.
- In App Settings, select Plan Migrator from the left sidebar.
- Tick the box next to each plan you want to move. You can select several at once.
- Click Migrate selected.
That's it. There's no export file to handle and nothing to re-map by hand.
After the migration: set up capacity properly
Jira Plans thinks about capacity per team. Portfolio thinks about it per person, then rolls it up. To get accurate numbers from day one, spend a few minutes on the settings below. You'll find them all under Apps > Portfolio > Settings.
1. Tell Portfolio how to read your work items
Under General Settings, choose:
- Bookings Start Date and Bookings End Date: the Jira date fields that place work on the Capacity Planner's timeline.
- Bookings Time Value Field: how much effort each work item needs. The options are Original Estimate, Remaining Estimate, Story Points or Story Point Estimate.
- Hours Per Day and Working Days: together, these set each person's available capacity.
If your teams estimate in story points, there's nothing to convert. You can plan in time or in story points, whichever fits the way your team already works.
2. Bring your teams
You can use your existing Jira Teams or create Portfolio Teams, whichever better reflects how your people actually work together.
Jira Teams show up in Portfolio as they are, and you keep editing them in Jira. Portfolio Teams are created and managed in Portfolio's settings. If your Jira Teams are already accurate, there's no reason to rebuild them.
3. Add holidays and time off
Capacity numbers that ignore public holidays aren't much use. Set up a holiday calendar for each location, either by adding dates manually or by importing an .ics file.
Then set the number of vacation and sick days people can take. You can set this for everyone or per person, as a number or as "Unlimited".
When someone books time off, the Capacity Planner shows them as unavailable on those days. We covered this in more detail in Bringing PTO Tracking into Your Jira Capacity Planner.
4. (Advanced edition) Add roles and skills
On the Advanced edition, you can create roles and skills and assign them to Jira users or groups. That unlocks role and skill filtering in the Capacity Planner. It also unlocks resource requests, which let you plan for demand like "a Java developer, 40 hours, in May" before you know exactly who will do the work.
What you can do with your migrated plan
Once your plan is in Portfolio, these features are worth trying straight away.
See who's overbooked in the Capacity Planner
The Capacity Planner colour-codes each person's workload:
- red for overbooked
- green for fully booked
- blue for partially booked
- gray for no work booked
- yellow for PTO or a public holiday
You can switch between daily, weekly and monthly views, drag and resize bookings, and split a booking across different periods. Change an estimate in the planner and it syncs straight back to the Jira work item.
You can also group capacity by Team, Role or Project and filter by projects and roles. When it's time to share, export the planner as a shareable URL or an Excel report.
Catch problems early with alerts
Add Capacity Alert and Delivery Alert columns to the Table view. Capacity Alerts point to overbooked assignees. Delivery Alerts flag date conflicts between parent and child items, as well as items that are past their start or due date with no progress.
Roll up the numbers that matter
Custom formulas let you calculate values from your Jira and Portfolio data, including values aggregated across the hierarchy. For example, SUM#children { this.storyPoints } adds up story points from an item's direct children. If you'd rather not write formulas yourself, the Portfolio Formula Builder Rovo agent writes them for you from a plain-language prompt.
Keep a timeline view (Advanced edition)
If you're used to the timeline in Jira Plans, Portfolio's Gantt chart in the Advanced edition will feel familiar. It supports five dependency types (End to Start, Start to End, End to End, Start to Start and Soft) and lag time in days.
Put it where people already look
The Portfolio and Capacity Planner dashboard gadgets put your saved views on Jira dashboards, so stakeholders don't have to go looking for them.
Standard or Advanced?
Both editions include the Capacity Planner, Capacity and Delivery Alerts, conditional formatting, bulk edit, planned revenue and costs, and the Portfolio Insights Rovo agent.
The Advanced edition adds:
- the Gantt chart and dependencies
- actual revenue and costs (with Clockwork Pro)
- resource requests
- role and skill filtering in the Capacity Planner
If you start on Standard and upgrade later, all the portfolios and Capacity Planners you've already created carry over to the Advanced edition.
FAQ
Can I migrate Jira Plans to Portfolio by HeroCoders automatically?
Yes. The Plan Migrator moves plans from Jira Plans into Portfolio by HeroCoders. You'll find it under Apps > Portfolio > App Settings > Plan Migrator.
What does the Plan Migrator copy?
Scope, exclusions, columns, groupings, sorting, hierarchy nesting, sharing and the plan owner.
Can I migrate more than one plan at once?
Yes. Tick every plan you want to move, then click Migrate selected.
Are there plans the Plan Migrator can't move?
Yes. Plans that combine multiple source types can't be migrated yet. You can recreate those as portfolios using JQL or filters.
Can Portfolio by HeroCoders plan capacity in story points?
Yes. Set the Bookings Time Value Field to Story Points or Story Point Estimate. You can also use Original Estimate or Remaining Estimate.
Can I keep using my Jira Teams?
Yes. You can use either Jira Teams or Portfolio Teams in the Capacity Planner. Jira Teams are still managed in Jira.
Where is my data stored?
Portfolio by HeroCoders is built natively on Atlassian Forge, so none of your data is ever stored outside your Jira instance.
Ready to bring your plans across?
If your Jira Plans already describe the work, the Plan Migrator gets that structure into Portfolio in a few clicks. From there, you can answer the question Plans leaves open: whether your people actually have the capacity to deliver it.
Read more about the planner in Portfolio by HeroCoders: Your New Jira Capacity Planner, or get started below.
