Mary from Planyway Atlassian Partner

Tempo Timesheets is the time tracking tool most Jira teams try first. At first glance, it has everything: worklogs, timesheet approval, comprehensive reporting. It’s also a more reputable player than most apps on this list, and some large companies simply feel safer with it. But Tempo lives in its own ecosystem. Resource…

How do you create a Jira resource workload report for your entire team? You need to know more than how many tasks each person has. You need to see how much work is assigned, how much time it should take, and whether people have enough capacity to get it done. Jira has several built-in ways to track work and check progress.…

Every project manager gets this question sooner or later: "Are we on budget?" Jira is a powerful tool for tracking work, but project budget management and project costs aren't its strong suite. It knows how many hours went into a Jira project. It doesn't know what those hours cost, because there are no hourly rates in it.…

Ask Jira for a resource utilization report and you get a polite blank. There’s no report with that name. The closest things, the Time Tracking, User Workload report and Version Workload reports, are on Atlassian’s retirement list (postponed, so check your own instance). So how do project managers see how busy a team really…

Open any Jira Cloud work item and look for a start button. There isn’t one. Jira lets you log work after the fact, but it has no timer. No play button, no running clock, no “stop timer.” That surprises a lot of people, and it’s the reason “Jira timer” is one of the most searched phrases around time tracking in Jira. This…

Move one date in Microsoft Project, and a dozen others can follow. Do the same in Jira Software, and dependent tasks usually stay where they are — even if the work blocking them has slipped by three weeks. If you’re moving from MS Project to Jira, this is often one of the first differences you notice. Questions like “Can I…

As someone who works on a cross-project planning tool, a good chunk of my week goes on calls with project managers. After enough of them, you start hearing the same conversation, almost word for word. It goes like this: We’ve got people spread across three or four projects. Every project has its own board. Nobody can see…

For years the answer to “can I see what one person has on their plate in Jira?” was no. You could see a team’s sprint capacity. For an individual, you were building a filter or opening a spreadsheet with that data. In July 2026 Atlassian shipped a Capacity tab, and the answer became “partly, if you’re on Premium.” What is…

Someone asks whether your team can take on a project in Q3. You open Jira. Jira shows you sprints, epics, a backlog — all of it work that already exists as tickets. The project you were asked about? Doesn’t exist. It’s a conversation, a slide, maybe a signed contract, but nothing has been scoped and nothing has been…

Somewhere in your Jira instance, a story point already has a price in hours. Maybe it’s in a team agreement, maybe it lives in one person’s head, maybe an automation rule does the math where nobody sees it. Ask on this forum, though, and the answer is always the same: points don’t convert. There’s a thread here that runs…

There’s an old thread in this forum where someone asks it better than I could: “It feels like a hack to add an Epic or a Story for a vacation. Is there another way to account for time off / PTO / Vacation / Holiday?” Five years on, the answer hasn’t really changed. There is still no native absence management in Jira: no…

Billable hours are the ones a client pays for. Non-billable hours are everything else that still has to happen — internal meetings, admin tasks, estimating work you haven’t won yet, rework nobody’s paying for. Both are work. Only one ends up on an invoice. Jira doesn’t know the difference. It logs time, and that’s where it…

The workshop went well. The backbone runs across the top, user stories stacked underneath, somebody drew the line for release one in a different colour. Everyone nodded. The photo of the board is in Confluence. Then a stakeholder asks when release one ships, and nobody has an answer. And that pause is the whole problem. A…

"How much work did we plan, and how much actually got delivered?" It's the first question anyone asks in a retro, and the last one a project manager can answer quickly. Jira Software has three reports that get close, each measuring something slightly different, but the trick is… none of them covers more than one board. If…

When teams ask us for a Jira roadmap for multiple projects, they usually describe it as a project management tool problem. "Jira can't show all our projects on one timeline." "Leadership wants something cleaner." Fair enough. But when we dig in on calls, the real problem is almost always one level up. The roadmap breaks at…

On one call, a manager described a problem I keep thinking about. Their team had plenty of work and worked hard, but they couldn't prove they were overloaded. Urgent requests kept landing from other departments, leadership expected everything fast, and the team had no way to show that saying yes to one more thing meant…

Someone asks for last month's hours by person. You open Jira, and there's nowhere to click. Jira time tracking is fine at the work item level — estimated time, time spent, remaining. What it doesn't do is turn that into a timesheet: people down one side, days across the top, totals everywhere. That's what finance asks for,…

Release management process is the strategic activity of deciding what ships, when, to whom, and on what conditions — then overseeing software releases until they actually land. Jira has supported this since its early days, and most teams use maybe a third of what's there. Here's the short version: what you get natively,…

Here's how a plan usually falls apart. Nothing looks wrong anywhere. The work item is in progress, the assignee is busy, the board is green. Two other teams are waiting on that item, and you don't notice until the meeting where someone has to explain a missed date. Jira does support dependencies. It just doesn't put them…

Jira has a reputation as an agile project management tool, and fairly so. It grew up as Jira Agile: sprint boards, backlogs, and burndown charts were all built for teams working in iterations. But plenty of work isn't iterative. Construction, manufacturing, hardware, implementation, regulatory submissions, and most client…

Jira dashboards are easy to create and surprisingly easy to get wrong. Most of them end up as a wall of gadgets nobody reads, which is a waste — this is the one place in Jira where data from multiple projects lands on a single screen. Why use dashboards in Jira? A Jira dashboard pulls scattered Jira data into one…

With a clear visual timeline, a Jira Gantt chart helps teams stay on track, manage task dependencies, and hit deadlines with greater visibility. In this guide, we’ll look at how to create Gantt charts in Jira, compare Jira’s native options with dedicated project management tools, and share practical best practices for…

We’ve just released a small but useful improvement to Planyway for Jira. You can now log time directly in the Timesheet view and see your tracked time at a glance. The Timesheet now gives you clear daily, weekly, and monthly totals, making it easier to review your work without switching between different views. If you’re…

When creating a Jira issue, ask one question: what role does this work play in the project? An Epic represents a larger body of work. Stories and Tasks represent the work needed to deliver it. Subtasks break that work into smaller actionable steps. This distinction is especially important in agile project management, where…

We’re excited to introduce the Gantt Chart in Planyway for Jira — a new way to plan complex projects while keeping the full Jira issue structure visible. Timelines are great when you need a quick overview of what is happening and when. But as projects grow, a simple timeline may not provide enough detail. You may need to…

Are you in control of your projects? Do you know if your team is on track or already over budget? Answer quickly. If you can't, you probably aren't tracking time consistently. Time tracking in Jira isn't about monitoring people or micromanaging their work. In Agile project management, it helps teams understand delivery…

Many Jira users work with several views throughout the day. You may need one view for the product team, another for marketing, and a separate setup for reporting or workload planning. Previously, switching between these views often meant changing filters and rebuilding the same setup again. With custom tabs, you can now…

We’re excited to introduce a new way to organize your work in Planyway for Jira: timeline grouping by labels. With this update, you can group Jira issues on the timeline based on their labels, making it easier to bring related work together and understand how different initiatives are progressing. Why group your timeline…

Jira hierarchy looks simple — until you try to put a Task under a Story and Jira won’t let you 😅. In this guide, we’ve rounded up the most important things to know about Jira hierarchy, based on the questions that come up most often in the Atlassian Community from Jira users.. We’ll look at the common limitations, clear up…

Like many teams in the Atlassian ecosystem, we've been watching the rise of AI with a mixed bag of emotions. Every week seems to bring a new AI assistant, AI-powered feature, or bold prediction about the future of work. Meanwhile, Jira admins and project managers are still dealing with the same everyday challenges:…