💬 Enterprise Connection: Reporting, including Advanced Roadmaps

[Dave Liao]

What reporting challenges are you facing? How are you handling them - or planning to handle them?

It's possible to extend Jira to get advanced reporting features. You can get Marketplace apps, connect to business intelligence tools, or link to an enterprise Agile planning tool.

On Jira Cloud? Use the built-in Basic and Advanced Roadmaps (for Premium plans) to visualize your work. The difference between the two? Basic Roadmaps shows your team's work at the epic level, while Advanced Roadmaps lets you link multiple teams' work at multiple levels.

Jira Data Center can take advantage of Advanced Roadmaps too.

Yes, roadmap features are intended for planning, but a shared roadmap informs the team of where everyone is during a project, and lets managers feel the pulse of their teams.

Share your thoughts!

[John Dunkelberg]

We're using EazyBI for our reporting needs (we're on Datacenter).  A lot of that is driven by the need to include company-specific business logic in our reporting.  Downside is that EazyBI is a separate DB on a refresh cycle, so people can't make a change in Jira and immediately see the results in their report.

We're going to be looking at Advanced Roadmaps, just kicking that effort off now.  We're hoping that this will help with the gaps we see in OOB reports scaling across teams/projects, without having to add overhead that doesn't match the way we do business.

One workflow enabler that comes to mind that I know has reoccurred on these forums is the need for coordinated fixVersions across the instance.  With hundreds of Jira projects all contributing to a customer-facing release, our management wants to be able to visualize and analyze data about the Epics committed to that release, drill down by business area, management chain, or other facets.  Imagine a burndown by fixVersion that spans that scale as an example, with that filtering.

[Dave Liao]

@John Dunkelberg - I like eazyBI. I appreciate its active community (like ours) and that eazyBI exists for Cloud, too. The fact that you can embed eazyBI widgets in Jira and Confluence never hurt either. 📆 Did you know eazyBI is hosting a community day next month? I started a thread on it on their community site.

The idea of having coordinated versions (without downloading a Marketplace app) is something I've been asked for many times.

[Capi [resolution]]

@Dave LiaoHow would you solve that requirement to have coordinated fixVersion insights currently with Marketplace apps?

[Dave Liao]

@Capi [resolution] - hey Capi! I updated my original comment from fixVersion to just versions. 😆

There's at least one Marketplace app I know of that syncs project-specific objects (versions, components) between projects.

[John Dunkelberg]

@Dave Liao I'd be interested in a pointer there.  We've done internal coding to solve but could be interested in additional capabilities.

[Dave Liao]

@John Dunkelberg - take a look at this app. I've tried it and it works as-advertised. Obviously since it's a sync, there's a performance implication, and you have to be cautious in situations where there's a sheer number of versions to sync - you don't want to accidentally sync something into oblivion.

[Thomas Egger]

We see a lot of benefits in Advanced Roadmaps for Jira Cloud. The Gantt chart allows many of our customers in business projects to get an overview which topics are on the schedule in the next weeks. Most of them use Epics for that.

A topic we hear from all our customers is a visualization of projects. For management acceptance it is really important to get an overview when projects are going to be finished and what comes next.

It would be great to see improvements on that side in the near future. Keep up the good work! 👍🏻

[Fabian A. Lopez (Community Leader - Argentina, Florida, California)]

I really like Advanced Roadmap, unfortunately I think we adopted the solution too early when our team was onboarding and moving from RallyDev. They were looking for Capacity management etc at that time and the got frustrated.

Now I need to reconquer them as the Advanced Roadmap is doing great improvement. I like the columns we can add and also the macro they developed to inject Advanced Roadmap directly into our confluence page. That is great for executive reports and for people that is more familiar with Confluence than Jira.

From our initial experience to the new one there is a lot of progress and I hope I can recover from our initial experience.

I am curious about reporting, we were looking for Pivot Table type of reports and EazyBI and Dataplane were part of the solutions we were evaluating. EazyBI is great but probably a little complex for end users, Dataplane fill that gap better but some functionalities like the PivotTable is not as we expected. End result our IT team developed a data extraction in 1K issues batches and they generate custom reports using SSRS

[Dave]

Hi @Fabian A. Lopez (Community Leader - Argentina, Florida, California) , 

I can understand your frustrations over capacity management - it's something we're looking to address going forwards and I've been trying to capture some insights from community members here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Advanced-Roadmaps-discussions/How-are-you-using-teams-in-Advanced-Roadmaps/td-p/1653163 ...if you have the time, I'd really appreciate any insights you can share (on that page) on how you're using teams and what your needs for capacity management weren't met on Advanced Roadmaps!

Regards,
Dave

[Fabian A. Lopez (Community Leader - Argentina, Florida, California)]

Thanks I will visit that page.

[Taranjeet Singh]

@Dave Liao I am not much into Advanced Reporting, but it is great to learn here from the reporting related challenges and experiences of all our Community Leaders and members who are sharing them in this wonderful discussion post.

[Dave Liao]

@Taranjeet Singh - Do you prefer another solution? This thread's for more than just Advanced Roadmaps, though I guess it sounds like I'm focusing on it 😂

[Vero Rivas]

Hi @Dave Liao 

   Jira in itself is a powerful product that is so flexible that you can use it for infinite casuistry, but it is true that addons give even greater potential to their base characteristics, some you may like more or less, but I think they all add value to the tool

Cheers

[Dave Liao]

@Vero Rivas - Hey Vero! Are there any reports you recommend to Jira users, especially when they're starting out?

I steer folks to the built in project-level reports to steer their team in the right direction. Even the issues summary page shows a lot of info and folks usually ignore that page (diving straight to the project's board/s).

[G subramanyam]

Hi @Dave Liao I use(d) the built in basic roadmap feature given my role and access. I liked that feature of visualizing at the team in company managed projects. 

[Dave Liao]

Nice! Do you encourage others to check the roadmap, or do you use it yourself to figure out what's next?

[Fadoua]

In my company we try to minimize adding more plugins to the instances only if it is badly needed and there is no way to use scripts

For reporting we use the out of the box reports available in Jira(We are DataCenter users)

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Interesting thread! I'd love to hear from you people, how you use advanced roadmaps! Your info and experience could be valuable to my clients.

[Paloma Fondon Araujo]

Roadmaps are great since many clients request as a requirement to visualize a gantt to track projects, at higher levels, they need to visualize the data in a more global way and at team level it is very interesting to know in which deadlines they are and how the project is progressing.

Customers (and me too) love the roadmaps because they include that much requested and easy to use view!

[Fabian Lim]

We've been able to cover any type of reporting with several plugins:

- eazybi: agile, insight, tempo reporting any visual reports that require calculations

- structure: dependency reporting

- bigpicture: gantt view and capacity planning

- rich filters: very easy to use to have filters on jira reports

- planning to upgrade our dc version to start using advanced roadmaps soon. Thanks for sharing experience everyone.

[Marjorie]

Oh, this is helpful information.  Thanks @Fabian Lim 

[Dave Liao]

@Fabian Lim - thought I replied to this, but I will (for posterity) years later 🤣

Adding my comments:

• I'm a fan of eazyBI's robust visual reports - they require expertise to craft, but you can meet niche customer requirements with it.
• Structure - and Structure.Gantt - cover more ground than Advanced Roadmaps did when I used it years ago (if Advanced Roadmaps was even installed, pre-Data Center).
• Rich Filters - nice to find someone else who's used this! I've seen Rich Filters power users make operational dashboards and skip the queue views in Jira Service Management.

[Laurie Sciutti]

Advanced Roadmaps has been a game-changer for us.  I conducted an efficiency workshop in our company reviewing it's capabilities which helped our teams get up and running.  Addressed a lot of reporting gaps for us (specifically with respect to capacity management).  People seem to like / work better via the Gantt chart as well so making bulks updates in that view has been a huge time-saver...

[Dave Liao]

@Laurie Sciutti - yesss, agreed!

Bulk updates aren't painfully obvious to users IF they even go into Issue Navigator results. Being able to easily multi-select and make edits has generally been a good thing for our users. 🙌