How Tollgate works

Investment governance in Jira, from business case to benefits

This Forge app tracks the investment behind the work in Jira. Delivery teams keep their sprints and tickets where they are. The steering committee gets a current answer on whether the investment is on track for the return that was approved.

Jira reports on delivery in story points and velocity, and sponsors approve investments in money and outcomes. Each investment moves through three acts here: Commit, Run, and Realise. A named person makes the call at each gate, and the record sits beside the work.

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Why steering committee reporting gets rebuilt every cycle

Each cycle, someone reassembles the record from the tools that hold it.

The business case is a deck that someone emailed at kickoff. Status sits in PowerPoint. Risks sit in Confluence. Decisions are buried in meeting minutes, and the budget lives in a spreadsheet that disagrees with the ERP. Someone rebuilds the picture by hand each reporting cycle, and it is out of date before it reaches the room.

Then a committee member asks a follow-up: “What did we decide about that change in Q2? What has it cost us? Which work packages does it touch?” Nobody can answer without leaving the room to look, so the meeting stalls.

Tollgate keeps the governance records for an investment in one place inside Jira, next to the work. The sections below follow one investment through it.

The six stages, from Discovery to Benefits Realisation

Each act ends in a question the sponsor asks. Commit holds Discovery and Approval, Run holds Initiation and Delivery, and Realise holds Close-out and Benefits Realisation.

01

Commit

The sponsor asks: is this worth funding?

The team writes the investment thesis, builds the financial case, and takes both to the approval gate. The funding decision goes on the record with a name against it.

02

Run

The sponsor asks: is it still worth it?

Work packages, risks and opportunities, decisions, and changes stay current during delivery. Cost, schedule, scope, and risk cards are derived from those records, so nobody can nudge a status colour.

03

Realise

The sponsor asks: what did we get?

Once the team has closed out the investment, the sponsor judges whether the benefits arrived. The verdict is recorded with the expected return beside the realised one.

Act one: Commit (Discovery and Approval)

Commit: the thesis, the financial case, and the approval gate

The business case defines what “on track” will be measured against.

Commit starts with the investment thesis, which states the business problem, the outcome, and the return being funded in one sentence each. A sponsor should be able to read it aloud. The financial case then computes NPV, IRR, and payback, discounted and undiscounted, from the cashflows you enter. Those figures become the targets the investment commits to.

Next, the business case goes to the approval gate. The sponsor approves it, returns it with notes, or archives it as an option that was considered and shelved. Each outcome is legitimate. The approved baseline stays fixed, and changes go through change control.

A named decision authority

One sponsor is accountable for each approval, and the record carries that name.

Adoption asked before approval

Before the sponsor decides, the business case asks whether people will take up the change. Investment Health later carries adoption confidence beside delivery confidence.

A committed target, on the record

NPV, IRR, and payback record what “worth it” meant when the sponsor approved. Realise sets the sponsor’s verdict beside them.

Act two: Run (Initiation and Delivery)

Run: the records and the status cards derived from them

The records are updated through the week, so nobody rebuilds a report the night before.

Once an investment is chartered, governing it means keeping its records current. Work packages hold scope, budget, and dates one level above the ticket. Risks and opportunities are ranked by impact and likelihood. Decisions are append-only, so nobody edits the past quietly. Changes to scope, timeline, and budget go through separation-of-duties approval, and gate states stay advisory, so nothing blocks the work.

Investment Health derives a status card for each of cost, schedule, scope, and risk from the records underneath. If cost is amber, the numbers made it amber. Nobody can adjust it before the meeting. You set one card by hand, which is Overall. When Overall disagrees with a derived card, the sponsor has a question to ask: “Overall is green but schedule is red, so talk me through that.”

Next to the RAG cards you record confidence on two counts: whether the investment will deliver the outcome, and whether people will adopt it. RAG shows where things stand today. Confidence is your forecast of where they are heading. It goes on the record under your name.

Investment Health dashboard during Run, showing the derived Cost, Schedule, Scope and Risk status cards

Work packages

Scope, budget, and schedule at the level a sponsor thinks in.

Risks & Opportunities

Threats, opportunities, and materialised risks, ranked by impact and likelihood.

Decisions

An append-only record of what was approved, by whom, and when.

Changes

Scope, timeline, and budget change requests, approved under separation of duties.

Act three: Realise (Close-out and Benefits Realisation)

Realise: close-out and the sponsor’s verdict on the benefits

Close-out comes first. The sponsor’s verdict on expected and realised outcomes follows.

When the work is done, the team closes the investment out. It records the as-built outcome, deals with residual risks, captures lessons, and confirms the handover to business as usual. Then the sponsor answers one question at each review: did the benefits arrive?

When the case is built, NPV, IRR, and payback rest on estimates the sponsor can inspect, so Tollgate computes them. After delivery it declines to compute a live realised-ROI variance. The counterfactual cannot be observed. Attribution takes years. A precise-looking figure built on contested inputs misleads the room. The expected return is recorded beside the return you got, in the sponsor’s own words.

In the Realisation view, the verdict sits beside the targets set at Commit.

Tollgate Realisation view, showing expected outcome next to realised outcome

Running the steering committee from Investment Health

Investment Health goes on the projector with data that is already current.

Live data drives the steering committee meeting. The thesis reminder opens it, the RAG cards give the status, and the decisions-needed block sets the agenda.

When someone asks a follow-up, the risks, changes, and decision log are one click away. For a broader question, Ask Tollgate answers from current data in plain language. It is read-only and makes no external AI calls.

Type, density, and contrast are set for a projector in a room of executives. Because the picture is kept current through the week, the presenter changes nothing before the meeting.

Tollgate Investment Health dashboard mid-presentation, showing the five RAG status cards
Portfolio view

Tollgate Portfolio: reading every investment in one view

Each investment sits in one of three buckets, Planning, Committed, or Realising, so the portfolio reads at a glance.

The portfolio view does for a whole portfolio what Investment Health does for one investment. It shows theme swimlanes, the RAG spread, investments overdue for an update, and total spend. Clicking any investment opens its Investment Health view. The presenter uses the same screens at both levels, so no roll-up deck needs syncing.

Tollgate Portfolio dashboard showing theme swimlanes and RAG distribution across investments
Planning
Committed
Realising

What Tollgate runs on and what it leaves to other systems

A Jira admin can review the Forge app, and it covers one job: investment governance.
Where it lives

Forge hosts Tollgate as a tab on each Jira project and a portfolio page under Apps. Your data stays on Atlassian infrastructure, and no Softwired server sits in the path. The Confluence integration reads linked pages, creates pages from templates, and writes key figures into an existing page. Ask Tollgate runs on Atlassian Rovo, needs Jira Premium or Enterprise, and makes no external AI calls. A governance group you manage decides who sees Tollgate, so delivery teams do not.

Scope boundaries

Delivery stays in Jira

Sprints, velocity, and burndowns stay in Jira.

The ERP keeps the ledger

Your ERP keeps the capital lifecycle, and Tollgate holds the governance view of the money.

Few settings to change

With the method built in, an admin has few settings to configure.

Export at any time

Governance records export to CSV or XLSX at any time, for anyone who needs the record on file.

Built on 20 years in steering committees

We have spent 20 years in steering committees, on both sides of the table, on seven- and eight-figure programs across eight sectors. The sectors are mining and resources, rail, energy, financial services, health, retail, education, and professional sport. Our method came first, and Tollgate puts it inside Jira.
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See an investment go from thesis to verdict in 30 minutes

In 30 minutes, the demo takes one investment from thesis to gate to verdict in the live app. Afterwards you decide whether it fits how you govern. Under standard Atlassian Marketplace terms, Tollgate is free for up to 10 users.

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If Tollgate does not suit how you govern, we will say so on the call.