Status reporting with weekly history

[Viktor Chuiko]

Hi! I've been using Jira Software for 15 years and could never figure out efficient project management level reporting with simple text status updates. 6 months ago I found out about Jira Product Discovery (JPD) and am very happy with the product. I also know about Atlas and looked at it and on the surface it is built to solve exactly for what my problem is, but in practice it doesn't work that way. I also know about Confluence. And I tried different ways of setting everything up between these products and I spent hours googling for a solution but no luck.

I'll explain how we use JPD+Jira and what I am trying to do.

We use JPD primarily to catalog projects and prioritize them. I have a custom field there to assign dev team(s) and we have view per each team with their prioritized projects, jira statuses and target dates. Dev teams track their work in Jira in Epics and Epics are linked to JPD Ideas to track delivery. I can go to each JPD and see which teams are involved and which Epics the work is tracked in.

What I need is for managers to provide weekly (any cadence really) text status updates on their Epics and ideally see that in the JPD. So let's say I have a Project (JPD Idea) and it is linked to 2 Jira Epics (each Epic is owned by a separate dev team with a respective manager). Each week a manager for that Epic provides a text status update on the progress for their respective Epic and update Epic target date if there is a change. Based on the updates I can then update the JPD target date and provide a summarized status update to the leadership.

I know I can create a custom text field for an Epic, but there are following issues:

1. Custom text field is just a field that gets rewritten every week or you just stack the updates. But I need to have a log of the updates, not just 2 months worth of updates in the same field. So I need something that works exactly like issues comments section (for logging) but be able to show the latest comment in a view or filter.

2. I need to see a view with updates for both Epics or any number of Epics linked to a specific JPD Idea.

And in JPD you can't even create a long text field for an executive summary and then the same issue with now status updates log.

So that's what my problem is and I can't seem to find a good solution that will do that in either Jira, JPD, Atlas or Confluence or even in Marketplace.

Can anybody please suggest a solution? Right now we just do it in Excel all manually and then I need to go update JPD manually and we have tens of projects running in parallel.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @Viktor Chuiko , this is exactly what we've built Atlas for, and why we integrated JPD with it. I can't really think of a solution that does what you describe without Atlas unfortunately. Thanks for the feedback. 

[Viktor Chuiko]

Thanks @Tanguy Crusson I was hoping you would chime in on this. Love JPD and all the videos you made for different cases.

Maybe I just don't know how to setup Atlas properly for this then. Also Atlas is migrating into Jira and as I understand not everything will work exactly as it is now in Atals or is it not the case? All the videos I could find are for Atlas as a standalone product.

Could you maybe point to a video that will help with my case? I saw that goals can be linked to Epics, but not to projects in Atlas. And updates are just general comments, not tied to a specific Epic linked. Am I missing something?

[Tanguy Crusson]

Have a look at this: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/Goals-and-projects-integration-ex-Atlas-ready-for-early-testers/ba-p/2195274

One way we use it ourselves is:

• Goals connected to Ideas
• Ideas connected to Epics (for planning and tracking the work)
• Ideas connected to Projects (for reporting weekly status)

Then you can visualize all this in JPD. 

[Viktor Chuiko]

To follow up on my question, essentially this is the structure of a report I need:

JPD ID | JPD Summary | JPD status | JPD target date | JPD level text update | Some other JPD fields

Epics info linked to that JPD:

-- Epic ID | Epic Summary | Epic status | Epic target date | Epic level text update | Some other Epic fields

So in a unified view I need to see all JPDs and their Epics with the info above. And I need to see such a report/view for each manager (managers are assigned to a JPD through a custom multi-select field).

Hope this helps. Thanks!