Is Jira a good tool for managing a customer implementation project of software and hardware?

[Kyle Freitas]

The implementation is mostly, testing software features before moving to production, creating documentation, providing customer training, moving code to production, updating final documentation and final regressive testing.

Does Jira provide the visibility across my internal cross functional teams and with the external customer with:

- major milestones and supporting tasks

- time lines (estimated and actual)

- asset allocation (staff and available work hours)

- project task interdependencies and sequencing

- reports for tracking current and projected task completions, milestone executions and estimated vs. actual project status.

[Amy Harvey]

Looks like no one ever responded to this question; but I have the same one.  Kyle- did you end up finding a solution to this, or using JIRA to manage your client-facing implementations?

[Everett Cavazos]

@Kyle Freitas and @Amy Harvey I just finished architecting/building an entire Implementation Project Plan environment in Jira for the customer success team at my company. They are currently using TaskRay but are looking to move to Jira. It includes the ability to allow a customer to interact with their To-do items and to set them to resolved.

It included an entire customization: new issue types, multiple customized workflows with conditions, project permission scheme updating, and issue security policy and scheme. I tested it with a test user and it does work.

As far as your ultimate question of it being a "good tool." That remains to be seen and subjective. It will require a little bit of hand-holding/education to the customer but it is fairly straightforward. I personally think it works great!

[Allie Stewart]

Are you using a service project for your customers and a software project for your developers?  I have that structure and it works great for each independent group. Customers can see their assigned tasks, move them through a workflow and close them out.  Developers can move their tasks through the sprint and workflow as well.

However, as the PM, I'm struggling to see status and updates on issues all in one place.  

To know the real status of an implementation task, that has associated dev work, I have to go to the service project task and click through to the related software task.  Then I manually read the comments and updates and get the status.  Then I go back to the service project task and manually update the status on that so that when I'm speaking to the client, I know what the real status is, rather than the service issue just showing "In Progress".

Does that make sense?

What I'd like to have is a service project issue with subtasks for the dev work.  However, you can't have subtask in a separate project and my dev manager needs his own software project to manage his sprints, resources, etc. 

This is the struggle!  Since we can only relate issues to other projects, there is a ton of manual work to update the parent issue and attempt to see all related status and updates in one place.

Any high level guidance as to how you structured your Implementation Project Plan environment would be SO appreciated.  Thank you.

[Everett Cavazos]

Oh wow sorry I just realized how old this thread is, apologies!

[Jessica Hesse]

@Everett Cavazos I am trying to do this exact thing - create an implementation project plan within Jira - I'd love to connect w/ you on details if possible!

[Rafael Lascano]

@Everett Cavazosand @Jessica Hesse did you connect on this matter? I'm also interested in organizing all customer implementations within Jira and eventually building a dashboard to handle all projects as a full-fled PMO.

Thanks!

[Jessica Hesse]

@Rafael Lascano we have not connected on this yet but if we do, will loop you in so we can learn together!

[Allie Stewart]

I am interested in this too!  We're developing our PMO and I have a nice project set up already with automations and detailed workflows.  Our clients can see the tasks that they are responsible for via the portal.  Seems to be working "ok".  But I would love to hear other ideas and see how best to use Jira for client implementations.  Thank you!

[Jonathan Gonzalez]

@Allie Stewart @Jessica Hesse @Rafael Lascano Did you guys ever connect on this? I am currently deciding if we should use a different tool for client-facing collaboration (like Smartsheets) or if Jira can be used for things like sharing timelines/Gantt charts, etc.

The most recent updates seem to help, but I'm unsure about giving clients access. Any suggestions would be awesome.