Updated: New Financial Calculations and Reports Coming in Version 10.98.0

Note: This article has been republished in order to provide notification emails to users subscribed to announcement updates, and to give additional visibility to the change in this feature’s release schedule.

The Jira Align Product and Engineering teams have decided to reschedule the release of new financial calculations. The release will take place in version 10.98.0, which will be deployed to the continuous release track, primarily used by sandbox environments, on July 16, 2021. Production environments on the bundled release track will see the features deployed in version 10.98.2 on July 30, 2021. This decision was made for a few reasons, all to ensure we deliver the best experience possible:

• Continue our work to confirm that the new calculations are performant across all types of data sets in Jira Align.
• Provide all users with sufficient time to prepare for these changes.
• Adapt to the recently announced changes to our release cadence.
• New! additional features:
  • Spend panels that inform you how estimations and child work items contribute to a Forecasted, Estimated, or Accepted Spend value.
  • Program and team-level Spend per Point reports, which surface any outliers in the team data that could skew financial values.

The Jira Align Product Team could not be more excited to roll out some major changes to portfolio-level work financials. Here are the highlights:

Three new spend values

We're introducing three new values to gauge your financial investments:

• Forecasted Spend is based upon the program PI estimates entered on the Forecast tab of an epic or capability’s Details panel.
• Estimated Spend is based upon child feature estimates, entered on the main tab of a feature's Details panel. 
• Accepted Spend is based upon effort point estimates from accepted child stories.

Forecasted Spend

Forecasted Spend is intended to provide insight into the scope of investment early in your work's lifecycle. Perhaps child features are yet to be defined and broken out, but, teams have begun forecasting the effort needed from each program for upcoming program increments.

In this case, we’ll generate a spend using each program’s PI forecast (converted into points if needed) multiplied by the program’s current Spend per Point (we’ll delve into this later on). These values are added to form an epic's Forecasted Spend.

Estimated Spend

The next level of detail is Estimated Spend. It should be utilized when teams begin to define and firm up features.

Estimated Spend is a feature's estimate (converted into story points if needed) multiplied by its primary program’s current Spend per Point. Spends from child features are added together to form the Estimated Spend for parent work items.

Accepted Spend

We’ve arrived at a view of investment once work is actually delivered. Accepted Spend is an accepted story's effort points estimate (LOE), multiplied by its team's Spend per Point for the sprint it was delivered in.

For example, a story with 5 points was accepted and assigned to sprint 1. In sprint 1, the team had a Team Spend per Point of $10/point. Therefore, the story's Accepted Spend was $50. For higher-level work items, Accepted Spend is simply a sum of spends from all accepted child stories.

This value is strictly for stories that have been accepted and should be used to understand the variance between what was budgeted, forecasted, estimated, and ultimately accepted.

Building blocks: Spend per Point values

You may have noticed how each new spend calculation hinges upon what we call Spend per Point. Forecasted and Estimated Spend use a Program Spend per Point, while Accepted Spend utilizes a Team Spend per Point. At a very high-level, Spend per Point is derived by determining how much each story point “costs”, based upon a team's funding and how many points they normally deliver.

Team Spend per Sprint

Let’s start with the very root of all it: Team Spend per Sprint. This is the rough labor cost for each team based upon sprint allocations.

For the sake of simplicity, consider a team, Team A, with two team members assigned to it (one developer and one tester). Each member is working in a program increment with a Blended Rate of $50/hour.

For the past five sprints, Member 1 was allocated at a full six hours a day (or 60 hours in a 10-day sprint), for a total cost of $3,000.

Member 2 was allocated at three hours a day (or 30 hours in a 10-day sprint). With the exception of Sprint 2 - where Member 2 assisted on another team - their cost was $1,500 for each sprint.

Together, the two team members account for total labor spend of $4,500 for Sprint 1 and Sprints 3-5; Sprint 2 has a spend of $3,000:

Team Spend per Point

Now that we have a Team Spend per Sprint value, we can move to calculate the Team Spend per Point associated with each sprint. Remember, this is the same value that will be multiplied by the story points (LOE) from accepted stories to generate Story Accepted Spend.

Let’s take our same example of Team A in Sprint 1. They had a Spend per Sprint of $4,500. In that sprint, they delivered 10 accepted story points. That means they had a Spend per Point of $450 / point ($4,500 divided by 10 points).

If the team delivered one 8 pt story and one 2 pt story, then the first story had an Accepted Spend of $3,600 and the second had an Accepted spend of $900. Ultimately, these spends will roll up to parent features and epics.

Program Spend per Point (rolling average)

Up to this point, we’ve determined a Team Spend per Point and used it to calculate a story's Accepted Spend, which is aggregated up its hierarchy to calculate Accepted Spend for higher-level work items. Forecasted Spend and Estimated Spend still remain. They use what we call Program Spend per Point.

Program Spend per Point is a rolling average of all normalized Team Spend per Point values from the past five sprints.

Let’s start by specifying normalization: Because story pointing is a measurement relative to each team, it would be impossible to aggregate Team Spend per Point values as-is (it's like saying apples + oranges = a grand apple). For this reason, we normalize each Team Spend per Point using a standard scale before plugging these values into our Program Spend per Point formula.

From there, we take a five-sprint rolling average of those values. Using our example one last time: Program Z has two active teams, Team A and Team B. Team A had a normalized Spend per Point of $450 / point for their most recently completed sprint. Team B had a normalized Spend per Point of $200 / point.

These two numbers are averaged together to get a Program Spend per Point of $325 / point for the most recently completed sprint. This math is done for each team’s past Spend per Point from the previous five sprints.

Once a Program Spend per Point is generated for each sprint, then a rolling average is calculated. In this case, that's $340 / point.

This rolling average helps smooth over outliers that could skew a Program Spend per Point for a particular sprint; for example, holidays or unforeseen escalations that de-prioritize story work.

Now, this Program Spend per Point can be applied to any higher-level work item to derive a Forecasted Spend and Estimated Spend. For example:

• For an epic with a PI forecast of 300 points for Program Z, 300 is multiplied by $340 per point to arrive at a Forecasted Spend of $102,000 (for Program Z).
• For a stand-alone feature assigned to Program Z with an estimate of 78 points, 78 is multiplied by $340 per point to equal an Estimated Spend of $26,520.

New panels and reports

Because we know you care about how these values were calculated, we're introducing spend panels for Forecasted, Estimated, and Accepted Spends. You can access a panel for an epic, capability, or stand-alone feature by clicking the relevant value from pages like the Portfolio Room:

And because Spend per Point values are the building blocks to calculate work item spends, we're introducing the Spend per point report, which will show you outliers that could be affecting a team or program's Spend per Point:

Supporting pages

You will be able to view the new financial values from multiple pages:

• Portfolio Room
• Status Reports
• Investment vs Spend
  • Currently known as Investment vs Actuals, the page name will change
• Budgetary Tracking
• Forecast
• Roadmap > Program Increment view

Page retirements

We will also be retiring five legacy pages with the release of these changes. With the exception of Investment Distribution, users will be redirected to the recommended replacement page in version 10.98.0:

• Investment Distribution will be retired. We recommend using Enterprise Insights.
• Strategy Dashboard will redirect to Strategy Room
• Investment by Theme will redirect to Investment vs Spend
• Earned Value will redirect to Portfolio Room
• Program Increment Analysis will redirect to Portfolio Room