Jira has to move to the Cloud. Does your PPM have to?

The Jira migration also raises the PPM question

A Jira Cloud migration answers the question of where Jira will be hosted in the future. But it does not yet clarify what role Jira should play in project and portfolio management going forward. This question becomes particularly relevant with Jira Data Center reaching end of life. Organizations that currently use Jira for project planning and management will need to plan for a platform change by 2029 anyway. Before moving existing processes to Atlassian Cloud, it is therefore worth taking a closer look at the long-term PPM target architecture.

Atlassian Cloud is the most obvious migration path for existing Jira Data Center customers. Organizations that want to largely maintain their current Jira landscape can move their existing processes and data to the cloud. However, especially when Jira is used not only for the operational work of agile teams but also for project planning and management, the migration should not be considered in isolation.

The key question is: Should the existing PPM landscape move to Atlassian Cloud as well, or should it be structured differently in the long term? Answering this question before the migration can help avoid moving existing structures to a new environment only to fundamentally change them again later.

Tip: Learn more about the general options following the Jira Data Center end of life in our article “Jira Data Center End of Life 2029: Review your platform strategy and options now”.

From project management to Strategic Portfolio Management

Project management and strategic portfolio management pursue different but closely connected objectives.

Operational project management focuses, for example, on planning tasks, coordinating responsibilities, meeting deadlines, and transparently tracking progress.

Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) takes this one level further. Organizations need to answer questions such as:

• Which initiatives contribute to our strategic goals?
• Which initiatives should we prioritize?
• Where should we invest our budget, and what business value do we expect?
• What resources and skills are available?
• Which initiatives should be postponed or, if necessary, stopped?

This shifts the focus from the individual project to the portfolio as a whole. Instead of simply asking, “How do we manage our projects?”, the question increasingly becomes: “Are we investing our resources in the right initiatives to achieve our strategic goals?”

What ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management covers

This is where ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management comes in. The solution helps organizations align work and investments more closely with strategic objectives and connect strategic and operational planning.

In simplified terms, the relationship can be illustrated as follows:

Strategy → Demand → Prioritization → Investments and Portfolio → Resources → Projects and Execution

Demand Management helps organizations centrally capture, assess, and prioritize requirements. Portfolio Planning provides transparency across projects and demands, roadmaps, planning scenarios, costs, resources, and risks.

This approach therefore goes beyond operational project planning: strategic objectives, investment decisions, and available resources can be more closely connected with actual execution.

Particularly relevant for existing ServiceNow customers

This question becomes especially relevant for organizations that already use ServiceNow as a strategic platform, for example for IT Service Management, CMDB, Change Management, or other service processes, while project planning takes place in Jira.

A typical setup might look like this:

• ServiceNow: ITSM, CMDB, Change, Services
• Jira: Project planning, Epics, Stories, agile teams
• Other systems: Budget, resources, finance, reporting

When portfolio and project data are distributed across multiple systems, additional interfaces and inconsistent data can result. ServiceNow SPM can connect strategic and project-related planning more closely with an existing ServiceNow platform.

Use cases: In two of our customer cases, Jira is used for project planning while ServiceNow is already established for Service Management. Instead of first migrating project planning to Jira Cloud, the plan is to manage it with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management going forward. In these cases, the upcoming Jira migration is being used as an opportunity to reassess the future platform architecture as a whole.

Jira and ServiceNow do not have to be an either-or decision

A new PPM target architecture does not automatically mean that Jira needs to be replaced entirely. Organizations with established development and agile teams can continue using Jira for operational execution while moving more of the strategic layer to ServiceNow. One possible division of responsibilities could look like this:

• ServiceNow SPM: Strategy, Demand, Prioritization, Portfolio, Investments, Resources
• Jira: Epics, Stories, Backlogs, agile execution
• ServiceNow: ITSM, Change, CMDB, Operations

ServiceNow offers integration options for Jira. Depending on the target architecture, a phased approach can therefore also make sense: ServiceNow can initially take over Demand, Portfolio, and strategic planning, while established agile processes continue to run in Jira.

In simplified terms, this creates the following division of responsibilities:

• ServiceNow answers: What do we want to achieve, and why are we investing in it?
• Jira answers: How do our teams execute the planned work?

This allows Plan, Build, and Run to be connected more closely without requiring every layer to reside in the same tool. What matters is that strategic decisions, operational execution, and Service Management are connected as seamlessly as possible.

The PPM target architecture should be defined before the migration

The Data Center end of life creates a natural decision point. Organizations can, of course, migrate their existing Jira landscape to Atlassian Cloud. However, such a migration still requires the existing environment to be assessed, including apps, users, and data, to determine their cloud readiness.

That is why the strategic PPM question should ideally be answered before the migration: Why move PPM structures to Jira Cloud today if it is already foreseeable that they will ultimately be managed on a different target platform?

This does not mean that migrating to ServiceNow is inherently easier or the right choice for every organization. A platform change also requires its own migration and transformation project. The point is to avoid an unnecessary interim migration if the long-term target architecture is already heading in a different direction.

When should you consider ServiceNow SPM?

Whether ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management fits your target architecture depends on your individual requirements. The following questions can help guide your assessment:

1. Do you already use ServiceNow as a strategic platform, for example for ITSM, CMDB, IT Operations, or other enterprise processes?
2. Do you want to connect strategy and operational execution more closely? Should it be transparent which projects and initiatives contribute to which business objectives?
3. Do you need an overarching view of Demand and Portfolio? Do you want to assess, compare, and prioritize requirements in a structured way before they become projects?
4. Do you want to integrate investments and business value more closely into portfolio management? Should there be greater transparency into which initiatives are funded and what expected value they will deliver?
5. Do you need greater transparency into resources and capacity? Do you want to identify which projects are competing for the same resources and where bottlenecks are emerging?
6. Are project, portfolio, service, and operations data currently spread across multiple systems? Should this landscape be more closely consolidated or integrated in the future?
7. Are you already facing a Jira Data Center migration? If so, have you defined the roles that Jira and PPM should play in your long-term target architecture?

If several of these questions apply to your situation, it is worth taking a closer look at ServiceNow SPM as a potential PPM target platform. This can be particularly relevant for organizations that already use ServiceNow strategically, as it may make sense to make this decision before existing project and portfolio structures are migrated to Jira Cloud.

Not Jira or ServiceNow, but the right PPM target architecture

The key question is not whether Jira is suitable for project planning and agile collaboration, but what role Jira should play in the overall PPM target architecture going forward. For some organizations, Atlassian Cloud will be the right path. Others may choose to manage Strategy, Demand, Portfolio, Resources, and project management more extensively with ServiceNow SPM or combine both platforms.

The important thing is to define this division of responsibilities before the migration rather than realizing afterward that the newly migrated landscape does not align with the desired long-term target architecture.