Tollgate holds the business case, the gate decisions, and the expected payoff of each investment in one live dashboard inside Jira Cloud. Sponsors, PMO leads, and transformation directors present from that dashboard in the steering committee.
Built by Softwired, with 20 years of governance work on seven- and eight-figure programs
When a steering committee runs from slides, the RAG status stays amber and nobody in the room can say whether the investment is still on track for what it was funded to deliver.
Each gap means the picture is assembled by hand before every meeting and breaks at the first hard follow-up question.
Above the line sit the people answerable for the money: sponsors, transformation leads, portfolio managers, and the steering committees they report to. Below it sits delivery.
Jira tracks delivery, which sits below the line. Tollgate tracks the investment above it. It reads delivery state from Jira and reports in the sponsor’s terms: business case, work packages, gates, and a record of every decision you can stand behind.
Delivery teams answer “are we building it well?” Sponsors have to answer “are we on track for the payoff we funded?”, and story points can’t help them with that.
It sits next to the work, behind the same login and inside the same security boundary, so nobody has a new tool to learn.
Tollgate follows each investment through six stages in three acts, from the decision to fund it to the sponsor’s verdict on whether the benefits landed. Gate states are advisory and never block the work.
Commit
In Discovery you write the investment thesis and build the business case. The financial case works out NPV, IRR, and payback from the cashflows you enter, and holds them as the targets you commit to. In Approval the sponsor makes the call at the gate and the decision goes on the record.
Run
Initiation and Delivery run on four registers: work packages, risks and opportunities, decisions, and changes. Tollgate works out separate cost, schedule, scope, and risk RAG statuses from those registers each time they change, so nobody picks those colours by hand.
Realise
Close-out and Benefits Realisation finish the lifecycle. The sponsor records the return they expected next to the return they got, and Tollgate declines to calculate a live realised-ROI variance, so the verdict is the sponsor’s call. Every investment rolls up into Tollgate Portfolio.
The project manager keeps the case file current through the week with small updates. When the steering committee meets, the dashboard goes on the projector, so nobody builds a pack. If someone asks a follow-up that has no slide, such as the budget impact of a Q2 change or the work packages it put at risk, you open the register or put the question to Ask Tollgate in plain language, and you answer from current data while the room is still there.
Each surface shows the part of a record needed for governance and leaves the rest to Jira and your finance system.
Business case
The reason the investment exists, with a Draft → Submitted → Approved lifecycle and a financial case that works out NPV, IRR, and payback from entered cashflows.
Work packages
Slices of scope with an owner, a budget, and a schedule. They’re the unit a sponsor thinks in, and each one links to the Jira epics underneath.
Risks and opportunities
Risks, opportunities, and materialised items in one list, ranked by impact and likelihood.
Decisions & changes
An append-only decision log and change control with separation of duties. When someone asks what was approved, by whom and when, you can show them.
Investment Health
The dashboard you present from. It shows RAG status cards, pending changes, top risks, recent decisions, and a flag when the picture goes stale.
Tollgate Portfolio and Ask Tollgate
Tollgate Portfolio shows every investment in one view, grouped by theme. Ask Tollgate is a Rovo agent that answers plain-language questions from live data through read-only actions and makes no external AI calls. It needs Jira Premium or Enterprise.
If your question is “are we on track for the payoff?”, this is the tool. If it’s “how’s the sprint going?”, it isn’t, and we’ll tell you so.
Runs on Atlassian
Tollgate is a Forge app that runs on Atlassian infrastructure, with no Softwired server in the path. Governance data stays inside the same boundary as the work it governs.
Practitioner-built
Softwired built Tollgate from 20 years of running governance on seven- and eight-figure programs. The method in the app is the one we used in those steering committees.
No lock-in
Free for up to 10 users, then priced per user through the Atlassian Marketplace, month to month. You can export the governance record to CSV or XLSX at any time.
In 30 minutes we run a steering committee from a live dashboard and work through your governance questions.
There’s no obligation, and we’ll tell you plainly whether Tollgate fits how you govern.
