Turning chaos into enterprise clarity with Structure PPM

When you’re a multinational financial institution operating across multiple countries, a simple Jira setup isn’t really a thing.

The company we interviewed here asked to be anonymous, so we’ll call them AGI Inc. At AGI, agile has matured to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFeⓒ) spanning across multiple countries and teams. With hundreds of users in Jira, they run complex programs with dozens of cross-linked projects.

Paul Mulder, AGI’s product owner for managerial tools, has been working with their tech stack for years. He knows that Jira can excel in providing snapshots of a team’s work – but it comes with limitations. 

For over seven years, Structure PPM has been Mulder’s solution for making Jira do more. A way to visualize the work of multiple teams, express issue hierarchy, and track custom metrics. 

Thanks to an assist from Tempo’s Gantt Charts for Structure add-on and Time Tracker, Mulder and his teams at AGI have been able to scale up and stay in the tools they know while getting more from Jira than they thought possible. 

Here is the story of how Mulder used Structure to build a company-wide solution for understanding their entire portfolio.

Turning Jira into an ART form

AGI’s adoption of SAFe meant work needed to be understood at multiple levels – from portfolio objectives down through Agile Release Trains (ARTs) and individual teams. But data was scattered across hundreds of Jira projects.

Mulder explains the difficulty bluntly: “Jira is quite limited in its functionality to consolidate, to relate several different projects together, and get insights. That’s why I got to know Structure and the Gantt Charts add-on.” Before Structure, there was no way to unify different project contexts, and program planning was a manual patchwork. 

The challenges:

• Seeing how initiatives rolled up across teams

• Understanding progress toward PI milestones

• Reporting on progress to management

• Giving stakeholders a clear, holistic picture of work

Making Jira a strategic tool

Structure pulls together disparate projects into meaningful hierarchies that mirror how work actually flows at scale. That meant portfolio → ART → program → team relationships became visible in one unified view – alongside custom metrics that different teams needed for daily workflows.

But the impact came from more than just stacking issues into hierarchies. AGI layered Structure with:

• Custom fields to denote PI context, due dates, and program stages

• Gantt Charts for timeline visualization that showed start/end dates across initiatives

• Formulas and ScriptRunner combining for rollups specific to AGI’s needs

Mulder said: “The only way I can get the information and consolidation I need scattered across Jira is through Structure. It gives me the correct insights to share with our stakeholders, but also internally, so our team can make sense of their work.”

Powerful plans, easier insights

Once Structure was in place, AGI started to see real improvements in cross-team planning and reporting:

Program and portfolio visibility: Structure enabled leaders to see work across dozens of projects in a way that mirrors SAFe hierarchy. By unifying data from multiple Jira projects, AGI gained a single source of truth that leadership and teams could trust.

Executive-ready reporting: Custom hierarchies and formulas turned raw Jira data into insights that stakeholders could consume – no more manual spreadsheet consolidation or ad-hoc Excel exports.

Better planning with Gantt views: Structure’s timeline views helped teams plan PI objectives, visualize dependencies, and adjust dates, giving teams and managers clarity around delivery expectations.

Mulder said: “We started out in our team and context – but it just kept growing. People see our presentations in meetings using Structure and Gantt, and they say ‘woah – is that possible? How do we get that from our data?'

“Gantt Charts added very nice visual insights on all our planning and progress, all the things relevant to our context. It enriched everything we got from Jira and helped our stakeholders make the right decisions and steer the entire program.” 

A foundation for the whole organization

In Mulder’s words, Structure PPM is indispensable because it brings clarity to complex data. Combined with Tempo’s tools for time tracking and reporting, it turned Jira into a portfolio-aware system that supports strategic decision-making, not just team execution.

From there, it spread across teams and departments and evolved into more than a workflow management system for Jira and into a tool that rolls up information across the entire portfolio – and creates custom visualizations for any purpose.

Structure became visible to other teams at AGI through Mulder showcasing work in meetings, but its value was deeper than the flashy data visualizations.

Mulder added: “What I find very useful is that we set up our own hierarchy in Jira – for enabling our portfolio level work, ARTs, and smaller teams. Thanks to Structure, we can visualize all our due dates, what PIs are active, and understand all these custom fields and hierarchies across levels.

“We see how our planning is looking, how execution is performing, and so can other stakeholders."

Looking ahead – cloud migration

Like many organizations, AGI is preparing to migrate from Data Center to Cloud since the announcement from Atlassian that support was ending. 

It’s challenging – Mulder highlighted that Jira runs throughout multiple teams in multiple countries and making the assessment of their entire instance and thinking what will move with them to the cloud is a major undertaking.

However, they have sought out help from experts in migration and Mulder and his team are taking the opportunity to rethink their tech and standardize where things make sense. 

His goals for the future include:

• Preserving critical functionality while migrating to cloud

• Reducing excessive customization in favor of more standardized practices

• Strengthening organizational clarity through consistent hierarchies and reporting

While the move introduces uncertainty, AGI’s investment in Structure and Tempo positions them well to take a strategic rather than a reactive approach. SAFe became a safe bet for success thanks to the skill of their employees, and a spot of help from Tempo.

Mulder even highlighted how Tempo support has helped over the years – a reminder that good tools paired with reliable assistance make adoption smoother.

For teams struggling with fragmented Jira data and needing enterprise visibility, AGI’s journey shows how Structure and Tempo can transform raw execution data into meaningful, boardroom-ready insights.