Bringing Clarity to Delivery: How Acora Modernised Portfolio Visibility

The Opportunity

Acora* is a New Zealand Crown entity responsible for delivering services to all New Zealanders.. With a large and complex organisation comes equally complex delivery. Across Acora’s teams, work was being planned and tracked in Jira, but not in a way that gave anyone a clear picture of what was happening and why it mattered.

Jira had evolved organically across the organisation over time, picking up legacy configuration along the way. Custom fields, link types, and workflows had accumulated without clear ownership. Teams were operating in their own corners of the platform, with limited consistency in how projects were set up or how progress was reported. Some teams worked in agile ways, others in more traditional waterfall approaches, and the platform wasn’t doing a great job of catering for either, let alone both.

The result was that creating reliable, portfolio-level visibility was harder than it needed to be. For Acora’s executives and PMO, getting a clear line of sight from strategic goals all the way through to delivery was a genuine challenge. Governance reporting was inconsistent, and the connection between organisational priorities and day-to-day work wasn’t easy to see.

Acora was embarking on a new Hybrid Delivery Methodology and needed Jira to actually support it, not work against it.

The Solution

Elegance Group worked alongside Acora to reconfigure Jira as the single, consistent platform for change delivery and portfolio management across the organisation, one that could accommodate both agile and traditional ways of working under a unified approach.

The engagement focused on three core areas.

Simplification and clean-up

Legacy configuration was assessed and rationalised. Unnecessary custom fields, link types, and priority values were removed or standardised, reducing noise in the system and making Jira a more intuitive tool for everyone who needed to use it.

Standardised project templates

New templates were designed to support different delivery types; agile, traditional, and hybrid, so that setting up a new project became faster and consistent regardless of the team or methodology involved. This reduced the time and effort required to get a new initiative off the ground and improved the quality of the data being captured from day one.

Governance-aligned reporting and dashboards

Dashboards were built to serve different layers of the business. Executives got a strategic view connecting organisational goals to delivery portfolios. The corporate PMO got oversight across initiatives. Value stream leads got the operational visibility they needed to manage their work day to day. Each stakeholder group now had reporting that was relevant to their needs, built on a consistent foundation.

Alongside the technical configuration, Elegance Group worked with Acora to define a governance model for ongoing Jira administration, clarifying roles, responsibilities, and how decisions about the platform would be made going forward. A Jira user community was also established to build internal capability and support consistency across teams.

The Impact

The outcome was a cleaner, more scalable Jira environment that genuinely supports Acora’s hybrid delivery model and gives stakeholders a consistent, reliable way to understand progress, risk, and delivery status.

What used to be a fragmented view of work across the organisation became a single Jira environment where strategic goals, portfolios, and delivery teams are all connected and visible.

Key improvements included:

• Portfolio visibility moved from fragmented, team-by-team views to a unified picture across all strategic goals and delivery portfolios
• Project setup time was reduced through standardised templates and a simplified configuration, removing the friction of getting new initiatives started
• Reporting consistency improved significantly, with agreed dashboard templates giving executives, PMO, and value stream leads the information they need without having to chase it
• Governance adoption was strengthened through clear ownership, documented processes, and a community of practice to support ongoing best practice
• Strategic alignment became visible end to end, from the board’s priorities right through to what teams were working on and delivering

For an organisation the size of Acora, having that thread of visibility from strategy to execution is no small thing. The work Elegance Group delivered has given Acora a solid foundation to manage change delivery and portfolio planning with the clarity and confidence the organisation needs.

*Please note Acora is an alias used to protect the identity of our client.