Waterfall Projects in JIRA Agile, I know someone has done this better than me

[Eric B]

Hi, I am new to an organization and I have inherited their tools and methods for 2 projects that are already partially in flight.

My dilemma is that the implementations I am working on are both going to follow waterfall. I understand what is good about JIRA, I am perfectly fine with it but my square peg is not fitting.

I have read several threads in this vein that did not yield much help. I am not interested in a discussion around the merits of agile. The development work is going into JIRA. I cannot implement a new methodology over night. End of story. I know someone has been in this position and I am sure someone has done this better than me.

I am trying to run these projects with MS Project and JIRA in parallel to produce the granularity and data I need. I hope to learn from this exercise and come away with a better plan for next time.

However, there is a fundamental mapping issue between single units of work (be it story, task or sub-task) moving through a workflow/process and the multiple line items that would be needed to track and properly manage the tasks in MS Project. I am also missing basic data like start dates and work estimates in JIRA. I have tasks that are not in JIRA occurring on the business side. I am not fighting a battle to put everything in JIRA. I can understand their position. Make it visible, keep status up to date and I will be good with MS Project.

This is looking to be an ineffective and laborious pursuit at this point. I don't like it. I don't have any better ideas.

Apps, add-ons, integrations, ideas how to organize work, ideas around configuration to produce/extract meaningful data from JIRA to manage a project that is not going to fit in the agile box, anything? I will most likely be adding some dates to help me at the very least.

I appreciate any feedback from anyone who has experienced a similar scenario and lived to tell the tale.

Thanks!

[Deleted user]

Hi @Eric B,

Great in-depth problem you have presented and I am very happy to help where I can. I would like to clarify what you want to get out of both packages and how you would like them to integrate better? 

Can I assume you use MS Project to track the overarching life cycle of your projects / entire portfolio, whereas Jira is solely used to track tasks for your Project Team/s?

Have you looked into Portfolio for Jira?

Main features include;

• Capacity Planning
• Roadmap Scheduling
• Forecasting 
• Roll-up Reporting

I use Portfolio for Jira to bridge the gap between the granular task management and the entire project / portfolio management. Essentially offering some high level features that MS Project offers. 

Hope this helps  

[Eric B]

Thanks for the reply @[deleted]

Right now my dilemma is related to just 2 projects. I have all the IT tasks in JIRA and a set of spreadsheets used by the business that contains all their activity.

I am using MS Project for the overreaching view like you said, but not to a portfolio level. I am using it to produce basic project data that I am not getting from JIRA, to schedule the work, to provide a consolidated view of project work and to get visibility into overall progress.

Project is individually licensed copies on local machines. JIRA is the only tool that could give me any portfolio level visibility, but you can see how it is being used negates whatever value it could have there.

I finally got a schedule together yesterday that I think will be workable. Not good. It is full of lots of manually entered, unreliable data because of the spreadsheets and data that is not captured in JIRA. Workable though. Surprisingly it is improvement to what was going on before.

I will check out Portfolio today and see if I can bridge any gaps of my own.

Thanks for the recommendation!

[Deleted user]

Glad I could help @Eric B,

Let me know how it goes.