🍂🎃 Apptoberfest discussion: project management apps

[Maggie Norby Adams]

Hi Community! It’s time for the second discussion in our Apptoberfestivities: project management apps 👩‍💻

Atlassian Marketplace Partners offer a variety of project management apps to help teams stay aligned and on track during complex collaborative projects.

What we want to know is, what are your favorite apps for project management and why? Which teams use your project management app(s), and how does the app help them stay aligned and on track during complex collaborative projects? 

Let us know!

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[John Funk]

Hi Maggie,

Easily Deep Clone is my favorite out of the list. It is robust and super helpful and user-friendly. It has given us a lot of extra functionality.

We have used Foxly in the past, but we work more Kanban style than Scrum so we don't have as much a need for that functionality now. 

I also like the Multiple Checklists functionality and OKR Board for Jira. 

[Nikki Zavadska [Appfire]]

@John Funk thanks for mentioning Foxly as your favorite PM app, so happy it made it to your selection of 4 apps 👏 😻

We do see customers using Foxly on all sorts of projects from Scrum to Kanban and Jira Work Management so if you ever have a need to do more data-driven prioritization in your projects you can book a demo and we can help you out with your use case 🤓 🍻

[John Funk]

Will do - and thanks for building such a good product!

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

@John Funk, it's great to hear that Deep Clone for Jira is one of your favorite project management apps. Thank you for that feedback!

[Paloma Fondon Araujo]

Hi @Maggie Norby Adams  and Hi all!!

In my experience and according to the clients I have worked with, we have included different apps for project management, but my favorites (among many others) are...

• Structure, is also another app that customers are enthusiastic about because many are used to keep track of projects in excel sheets and with Structure they can establish the hierarchy individually and not necessarily globally, among many other features.
• And of course, BigPicture, BigGannt, since many of the customers also need to see the task maps with the bars of these 2 apps. On the other hand, I am delighted with Jira's "Advanced Roadmaps" functionality as it is something that is included natively and covers many of the requirements that customers ask for.

Best regards!

[Suvradip Paul]

Deep Clone for Jira and Table Filter and Charts for Confluence are my favourites. Other than these two I would definitely vote for Planning Poker.

Bulks Cloning feature in Deep Clone for Jira is one my favourite utilities. Data Aggregation and export utilities are my favourites for Table Filter and Charts for Confluence.

I would love to go and explore others apps on recommendation and share my experience.

In summary, the reasons behind the above feedback - simplicity, security and robustness. 

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

@Suvradip Paul , thank you for mentioning Deep Clone for Jira as one of your favorite project management apps. This means a lot to us. 

[Suvradip Paul]

You're welcome @Marlene Kegel - codefortynine !

[Kelly Arrey]

We at BlueCat Networks are glad we found ALM Works Structure for Jira - you can read about our journey here.

We wanted to keep everyone in sync without adding friction to our Jira setup. Structure helped us achieve exactly that. We started with Structure on-prem, and migrated to the Atlassian Cloud earlier this year. Our issues are organized in hierarchies that work for us, and we can zoom in and out as needed.

[Nathaniel Elliott]

I'll second the post above from Kelly Arrey from BlueCat Networks. My team over at Dragos now has a well-functioning workflow on Jira Cloud using Structure, which lets us see the holistic picture of the work that we do: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Interview-with-an-Expert-How-Dragos-Created-Project/ba-p/1703183.

Happy to talk through any of the areas on how we do it and also how we do it and are building our PMO out in an agile way (internally calling it the "Business Delivery Team) made up of our Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Project Managers. 

[Friendly Giant]

At  #DescartesSystemsGroup   we have been using #BigPicture and were very fond of it, despite the double entry of few tasks.   it provided a better view on total activity compared to exporting from Jira to an othe rtool, mostly Excel😜  So yes a happy .....or better appy user

[Maxim Grouchevoi]

We at DKB AG prefer to work with ALM Structure & Structure.Gantt. This is our favourite app which gives us the required overviews, scoped and nested views and progress reportings. The real power of Structure lies in generators, effectors and formula fields. Structure definitely helps us to get rid off those excel sheets!

Furthermore in our Scrum projects we love to work with Easy Agile Story Maps. It provides you a very user-friendly interface and a far more better Epics/Sprints/Backlog overview, which can extremely boost the scrum adoption among newbies. 

And I definately would recommend to powerup your Jira with Dynamic Forms for Jira (Deviniti) and Elements Copy&Sync for Jira. :)

Cheers! 

Maxim 

[Erez Marcovich]

With Structure for Jira along with a few other apps, we’ve finally managed to solve our requirements traceability problems:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Interview-with-an-Expert-How-Amdocs-Reduced-Requirements/ba-p/1537076.

The Structure Automation feature was a game-changer for us, allowing us to pull real-time information to show the status across all levels. It is the basis of the hierarchy we use today. 

[Dave Liao]

My favorites:

1. I love Structure - especially with the Structure.Gantt add-on, for those times when you need a Gantt-chart to really show those dependencies!

2. I like eazyBI to give me the pulse of a project, and to illustrate trend data.

eazyBI is always tweaking and adding visualizations - in the beginning of the year, they introduced sparklines (mini-charts) that provide trends on a more micro-level.

[Gorka Puente _Appfire_]

For project management: 

• Projectrak to annotate the relevant information in every single project, and have a quick way of tracking their status.
• Reports and timesheets for jira for those projects that need keeping track of the time.
• Jsu automation for jira to automate as much as possible and save time for the project :)
• BigPicture for products that expand in several projects

[Huwen Arnone _Deiser_]

So cool!! Thank you for the mention @Gorka Puente _Appfire_ 🤩

The Projectrak team appreciates it. Here's our demo! 

[Kelly Arrey]

I also want to give a quick shoutout to two more apps which bring a lot of value to our Jira system:

• SolDevelo's Worklogs makes it easy to generate monthly Time Spent reports. We combine this information with Excel exports from ALM Works Structure (which I mentioned above) to generate rollups of the time logged on Stories, up to their parent Epics, Goals and Features.
• OBSS' Time in Status helps us zero in on bottlenecks in our workflows.

All three vendors are super-responsive on support issues and feature requests, which is greatly appreciated!

[Gorka Puente _Appfire_]

And as a product manager with many products and tons of features, bugs, requests, improvements and tasks to prioritize and release ASAP I love Foxly 🦊

I use the priority matrix, it simplifies a complex problem and gives a reasonable answer to stakeholders to the question, why MY issue is not planned yet? 

I only regret it is not named Catly 😼 #TeamCat

[Biro]

Yay, so glad to hear you're using Foxly 🙌

[Nikki Zavadska [Appfire]]

Haha, Catly is a great name! (Reserving that for the next app ✍️)

[Girish_Shenoy]

Big Picture

Love it! Specially if you want a good PPM and resource tracking capabilities.

[Anna-BigPicture]

Thank you for mentioning our app @Girish_ShenoyWe're delighted that you find our product efficacious in supporting project management.

[Lukas Gotter _ Meetical]

Meeting Management is an important part of Project Management too! 😎

Please check our Apptoberfest contribution for Meetical Meetings and turn your meetings into serious fun and productive sessions!

🍺 Apptoberfest Demo 🎊 Meetical Meetings for Confluence (funny video)

[Brant Schroeder]

We use Big Picture and I really like it.

[Anna-BigPicture]

I am glad to hear that! Thank you for the mention, @Brant Schroeder 

[Clint Young]

I used to work at a place where we used Big Picture. It was beloved by many.