How can I contact someone from Jira to help me understand if Jira is suitable for my team's needs?

Question

I am an intern at Continental looking to help move my team to another software for resource planning. Jira is one of our options. I need to know if Jira can do the following and possibly get in contact with Jira for a demo of this process.

Can Jira:

1. Assigns projects to individuals as well as teams and can be managed in one place by a manager

2. Create a heat map that consists of schedules for different employees over an extensive period of time, can track overallocation and capacity planning

3. Can create a dashboard where I can view graphs by disciplines, for example: a bar graph that shows what project types that employees are working on with percent allocation as the y axis

4. Projects can be listed by different types (tentative, in progress, archived, etc.)

5. Can allow only a certain amount of people (managers) to edit and view the information

If you know anything about if Jira completes these requirements or someone I can contact at Jira please let me know!

Steve Long -Evelon- · Answer

Hi @John Mitchell

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Firstly, it's no doubt best to check out all of the documentation provided by Atlassian on Jira. This will no doubt answer a lot of questions! Ref: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira

Otherwise, it might be worth reaching out to an Atlassian Solutions provider (like ourselves) to have a discussion and see how they might be able to help.

Hope that helps - Steve.

Mark Segall · Answer

Hi @John Mitchell and welcome to the community!

Jira is best suited for organizations that have adopted Agile ways of working which is primarily focused on team-based capacity planning over the individual.  So keeping this in mind...

Assigns projects to individuals as well as teams and can be managed in one place by a manager

Projects is a loaded term.  There are several ways you can manage a "project" in Jira depending upon the definition. You can assign "issues" (tasks, stories, bugs, etc.) to individuals.  Issues are not assigned to teams, but you could break out the activity into individual sub-tasks that are assigned to various team members.

Create a heat map that consists of schedules for different employees over an extensive period of time, can track overallocation and capacity planning

Reiterating my initial point.  Jira is best served for team based collaboration.  You're not going to get a lot of canned reporting based upon individual work.  You would probably be best served leveraging worklogs and/or a marketplace app for this.

Can create a dashboard where I can view graphs by disciplines, for example: a bar graph that shows what project types that employees are working on with percent allocation as the y axis

You can create custom dashboards with activity tracking by project team or assignee.

Projects can be listed by different types (tentative, in progress, archived, etc.)

There are several native statuses and you have the ability to create custom statuses

Can allow only a certain amount of people (managers) to edit and view the information

There is an ability to configure permissions and you can get quite complex with issue level security if needed.

Bottom line - If you don't have experience with Jira, I would recommend visiting Atlassian University and going through some of the basics like Jira Fundamentals.  I would also recommend engaging an Atlassian solution partner to help get you started.  Like many enterprise tools, Jira has best practices for implementation that require adjusting your business processes to fit rather than trying to force your processes on the tooling.