A Project Manager Guide to Jira Align - Part 3

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Status reporting is a key activity that most Project Managers undertake and in the previous two parts of this article series we have addressed how to provide some great, real time reporting from Jira Align.

Did you know Jira Align actually has a status report? A good status report offers a high level overview of your project and the work you are tracking. Executives should use the data in the reports to review overall status of a portfolio, and various levels of hierarchy. The primary focus should include an evaluation of schedule, budget, risk, scope, quality, and progress.

Dilbert Comic Strip November 9 2007 

The Jira Align Status Reports has a lot of details that can be displayed. There are two toggles on the Status Report, View Status and View Financials. We will focus on the View Status page in this article.

Let’s start off by simplifying the status report page. By default, most everything is turned on and I suggest going in and turning off some of the values to simplify the report.

In the first article, we covered the Roadmap status settings. Unfortunately those settings are only on the Roadmaps page, so setting another RAG (Red, Amber/Orange/Yellow, Green) status could be redundant, conflicting and may require some coordination and validation between the Roadmap and Status Report pages.

There are additional subjective status settings that are only available on the Status Report page that many organizations would like to take advantage of.

1. When you set the Show Dials to YES in the configuration, these dials will be displayed. You can manually set the dial settings and add notes when you open up the configuration area for the dials. Note that I’m setting this for the Portfolio that is set in the main configuration bar.

2. The notes from the executive dials shows up when the dial details is set to YES.

3. For the list of EPICS in this Status Report view, you can individually set the running RAG status of the EPIC. If you hover over one of the small boxes, it will show a date timestamp and who made the update. Do note that this is a continuous running status and the statuses are not editable. As you set the status to On Track, Some Risk or High Risk, a new status is recorded. I recommend that the Project Manager create a cadence of when to update the status for each epic in the portfolio.

4. One of the lesser known features on the Status page is that summary and % by RAG is summarized in this bar. It shows the percentage of Epics by RAG status as well as the number of Epics making up each of those statuses. The blue section are Epics with no status set.

5. The Epic Health is accessible and can be set in a few places including the Status Report. From the details panel of the Epic you can select the Status Report link which will take you to the Record Status page where the Health can be set.

Another page that the Health can be viewed is from the Work Tree when you set the extra configurations to Show Health.

The Health is broken down into five areas, Budget, People, Quality, Risk/Issues and Schedule. You can set each area to a RAG setting and add a Reason. Some PMs will add a date on the reason as well since there is no history saved as it really is a point in time view of Health.

Here at Atlassian, we’d love some feedback on how you configure and use the status report views since we only covered a portion of the functionality on this page.