# Project Portfolio Management and Resource Planning with Jira > The EEX Group needed to replace its portfolio tool and didn Source: https://www.xalt.de/en/case/eex-project-portfolio-management/ The EEX Group needed to replace its project portfolio tool – and didn't want to maintain the same data twice. Today the portfolio runs in Jira, right where the projects already lived, complete with resource planning and approvals. Project managers now need half the time they used to. - 50% less planning effort for project managers ## Why Portfolio Management? Project portfolio management is the process of governing and controlling a collection of projects within an organization, to ensure they support strategic goals and maximize overall benefit. Without this overarching project coordination, it can lead to a situation where - different areas of the company work on the same topic (siloed solutions), wasting resources unnecessarily, - projects are started that don't contribute to company goals, - projects aren't aligned even though they have interfaces with each other. ## The Company [European Energy Exchange (EEX)](https://www.eex.com/de/) is part of the EEX Group, a globally active corporate group specializing in international commodity markets. As part of the group, EEX offers contracts on power, natural gas and emission allowances as well as freight and agricultural products, and is one of the world's leading exchanges for trading energy and energy-related products. Central project management within the group is provided by the clearing subsidiary [European Commodity Clearing AG (ECC)](https://www.ecc.de/en/). ### The starting situation The goal of the project was to replace the existing project portfolio management tool used by EEX and ECC. Due to an upcoming database migration and the associated challenges and risk of potential data loss, EEX and ECC decided, after weighing all options, to discontinue using the previous tool. Data maintenance was also very time-consuming for the responsible project managers and, due to the long delays between actual status and documentation in the tool, provided no up-to-date evaluations, or was incompatible with agile ways of working. It was also important to be able to carry the existing configuration for the "Flight Level" method for coordinating and running projects over into a new tool. Since the actual project planning for company projects, as well as the organization of operational activities, already largely took place in Jira, it made sense to also map project portfolio management in Jira. Project management therefore had the following goals in mind: - making project management and project portfolio management more efficient by only having to maintain data in one tool (Jira) and using automated workflows, - creating an always up-to-date overview of all projects, to enable more effective resource planning and better coordinate projects, and - further advancing the goal of switching to agile ways of working with Jira. Since XALT had already been supporting EEX and ECC as customers for several years and had successfully implemented various IT and business processes in Jira, it made sense to develop a solution together here. ### The challenge Crucial to the successful implementation of this project was that the XALT TEAM fully understood project portfolio management and the Flight Level methodology, in order to bring the business view together with the IT side. Only this made it possible to build the workflow correctly in Jira. Another challenge in this project was creating a solution for resource management within project portfolio planning in Jira, even though Jira software isn't designed for this use case. For EEX and ECC, however, this was an absolute must-have of the new solution, and so the XALT consultants' full know-how and creativity were needed for the technical implementation. The experts on the XALT TEAM gladly took on this challenge, confident that Jira offers the flexibility and technical capabilities to map the most varied processes. > Migrating and mapping our project management processes into a shared Jira-based tool helps us manage our project portfolio even more efficiently and with more agility. As a result, it makes decision-making processes and coordination within our corporate group significantly faster and more transparent. > > — Caroline Bartlitz, Senior Project Portfolio Manager ## The Solution The project started with an evaluation of the existing project portfolio management tool and the requirements for mapping the Flight Level. The XALT TEAM then defined the requirements for the new solution based on the existing system and process configurations. In the planning phase, the work steps for implementation in Jira were then defined and prioritized. The work packages were divided as follows: - Set up an overview board in Jira mapping all projects with the relevant data – for example how many person-days are planned or already spent on projects, what a project's percentage progress is, and how the effort incurred is linked to individual deliverables. - Build a hierarchy structure, so that project portfolio management as an overarching instance can sum up and map all necessary project information. - Implement workflows and define new issue types, for example for monthly reporting and resource-based project planning. - Create automations in Jira, so the necessary information from projects is automatically available in project portfolio management. - Set up scripts via ScriptRunner to extend certain functions and build simple applications that can't be implemented with Jira Automations – for example hiding fields or setting write permissions on a field. - Develop resource planning including an approval process. For this, Jira Service Management's Asset Management was used along with standard Jira functions. An asset was created for every functional team within a project. This lets the project manager assign effort from their project to an asset or role (for example the IT team, finance team, customer area team) when planning a deliverable. In a next step, the responsible manager of that team can then approve or reject the required resources. - Testing and go-live. Over the roughly five-month project, the XALT TEAM worked in an agile way together with EEX and ECC. Features were prioritized and worked through based on Jira Advanced Roadmaps. In daily stand-ups, progress and the respective next tasks were coordinated within a cross-functional team. ## The Results Implementing project portfolio management and project management in Jira has led to significant efficiency gains, both for users and at the management level. Acceptance and the associated use of Jira within EEX and ECC is also higher, so Jira has become a fixed part of daily work. Users' existing Jira know-how enables joint further development of the project portfolio management tool as well as coordination of work at the delivery level. These results summarize the benefits: ### Reduced workload - Planning effort for project managers was reduced by around 50%, since no duplicate data maintenance is needed to have the data relevant to portfolio management readily available. - Using automated workflows reduces manual effort and makes it less error-prone. - Jira enables evaluation of portfolio management data directly in the tool using dashboards, reducing effort spent on manually created presentations. ### More transparency and confidence for decision-makers - Display of the up-to-date project status on the project portfolio management overview board. - Integrating all information into the same system minimizes the risk of manual errors and improves data quality. - The ability to coordinate cross-team project work, down to linking resulting tasks to a single team member. ### Efficient resource planning based on current data The resource planning in Jira, developed by the XALT TEAM according to customer requirements, offers - a clear overview of the roles within a team assigned to certain project tasks, and - capturing planned effort per role. ## More Success Stories Energy trading ### [Dynamic Redesign of the EEX Intranet with Refined](https://www.xalt.de/en/case/eex-intranet/) EEX Group needed a new intranet in two and a half weeks – the old one was still running on a different platform. With Confluence and Refined, it became a work platform for around 700 employees: a mega menu instead of searching, its own corporate design, and content maintained by the teams themselves. Read case study → Financial services ### [Purchase Order Automation and Digitalization for Our Client in the Financial Sector](https://www.xalt.de/en/case/process-digitalisation-with-jira/) Every order traveled on paper through internal mail, department by department – taking so long that quotes lost their validity along the way. Then came Covid and remote work. Today the order process runs in Jira, with digital signatures and automatic approvals: half as long as before. Read case study → Mechanical engineering ### [Atlassian Cloud Migration of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket](https://www.xalt.de/en/case/fath-atlassian-cloud-migration/) FATH ran Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket itself – and paid for every outage: troubleshooting, recovery, staff time. All three systems moved to the Atlassian Cloud in one go, without disrupting daily work. Downtime fell from twelve hours a year to almost none, and operating costs dropped by 80 percent. Read case study → ## We help your team achieve greatness in every aspect Want more information or a tailor-made solution? We help you get the best out of your company. Feel free to contact us by phone, email, or visit us at our office. [Contact us](https://www.xalt.de/en/contact/) --- *This version is for AI agents. Every page of this site is available as Markdown: append `index.md` to its path. Index of all pages: [llms.txt](https://www.xalt.de/llms.txt)*