Export or publish routine for project overviews

Question

Hello community,

i'm an absolute newbie in terms of Jira, but I noticed that there is (hopefully) room for improvement in how our company uses it.

As an improvement suggestion to management I would like Jira to export the Gantt charts of all open projects that are not labeled as completed to a PDF periodically. (Ideally daily, overwriting the previous version)

Goal of this routine would be to improve communication and offer information to other departments so that they can better plan their own staffing, deadlines, weekly goals etc, without having to run to the project management to gather information.

With an exported pdf even the assemblers would be able to check the schedules and speak up if deadlines fail or other problems arise.

Ideally the project leaders report these to their involved departments themselves, but in reality this doesn't happen.

If there's a way to automate this process i'd be glad to pitch this to our management to improve employee satisfaction and include them more in our processes.

Gerda Grantiņa _ eazyBI · Answer

Hi @Mhaus 
If you are interested to expand Jira's capabilities regarding reporting, you can check our "eazyBI for Jira" app.
It has a gantt-chart, export to PDF option as well as many other analyze and visualize options for your Jira data.
Although the best would be to publish the reports in the environment your users are working,e.g. in the Jira dashboard.
Check the demo account to see more: https://eazybi.com/accounts/1000/dashboards/14871-chart-types

best,
Gerda // support@eazyBI.com

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

Better PDF Automation (which adds automation capabilities to the Better PDF Exporter app) perfectly matches this use case.

You haven't detailed what a Gantt Chart would look like, but there is a template that you could use and refine:

(Discl. the automation app is free and supported, while the exporter is paid and supported. Both are developed by my team.)

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Mhaus and welcome to the Community,

Your question is very much a consultancy question, if you ask me. No matter what tools you are using, if you feel information is not flowing or being used to the best of its capacity, your organisation culture and practices need work.

Nevertheless, Jira as a tool CAN support you, as it has a lot of possibilities to provide transparency on the work that is going on in real time. That requires you to set it up properly, in accordance with how your teams work. And it also means you should familiarise yourself with available reporting capabilities and functional extensions from the Atlassian Marketplace.

If I may give you one essential piece of advice: if you want to use the tool to the best of its ability: do not export the data to distribute information to management. As soon as you export, you lose the real time aspect and the connection to the actual work in the system. Rather use your dashboards and reports directly in the tool during your status or other meetings. That will build familiarity with the possibilities and raise awareness that you will never achieve if you communicate through exported data (which additionally causes additional work and processing).

As a final tip, have a look at Atlassian's Agile Coach microsite, where you can find a lot of context on tips on agile work with or supported by Atlassian tools (and even more importantly: practices).

Hope there are some useful pointers in here!