Comparing JIRA vs MS Project for large program scheduling

[Angela Highfill]

I work with some people (not JIRA experts) that are pushing for the use of JIRA to develop and maintain a project schedule. The schedule would be a very large, complicated one, working with 15+ technical teams, most of whom are NOT working in Agile. Some engineers are using JIRA to track and monitor tasks though. Does anyone have any experience using JIRA as a scheduling tool?  And how would you compare it to developing/maintaining a schedule in Microsoft Project?  

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Angela Highfill and welcome to the Community!

From quite a long experience as a consultant working in all kinds of environments, I have never seen MS project being used to actually track work (in real time). I have never seen it being used differently than for creating a schedule, usually by a project manager who then updates the schedule after collecting data (somehow). The gantt chart is an actual gantt chart there, with a critical path and baselining capabilities and stuff like that. I see it being used very often to showcase the quality of the scheduling work.

In comparison, Jira is much more focused on the work actually being delivered and tracking progress in real time. Scheduling work is part of that, obviously. Out of the box, you could use sprints (which is a totally different approach than gantt charts) or project timelines. These timelines are not gantt charts, they are rather visualisations of start and due dates and dependencies in a schedule. With marketplace apps as feature extension, you can build planning capabilities in Jira that mock the behaviour of traditional gantt chart planning very closely, while still having the benefit that the work can be assigned, organised and progress tracked in real time, providing transparency to everyone involved, all the time. Not just the project manager.

But running projects and managing work effectively is not just about tools. It requires the talent and skills of people (first and foremost) and practices as well, having tools in place to support the other two. It is perfectly possible to track your complex project plan using sticky notes on a large wall. It just requires people to come to that wall physically to see and update the plan. When you talk about the project schedule, you will also have to ask yourself what level of detail is required for different stakeholders. Also about how you want to provide insight to the different teams what they are contributing to. And so on. I am a firm believer that bringing the schedule and the actual work together (or at least integrated) benefits both the people who craft the plan as well as those executing it.

Hope this helps!

[Angela Highfill]

Thank you, Walter! My stakeholders for the program's schedule are internal corp execs and external customers primarily. We already know that the lowest-level engineering tasks, as well as higher-level tasks throughout this complex program, will not be consistently and reliably refreshed and managed. Given this, I would not rely on this underlying data to build a program schedule; I would be creating a high level program schedule independently of the work occuring day to day.  In other words, the request is to use Jira as a scheduling tool, much like MS Project is used.  My question is:  Can this be done effectively, and especially with the use of Jira plug-ins?  Do you have any experience with scheduling plug-ins?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Angela Highfill ,

I understand that this is maybe not an efficiency discussion, but I find it difficult to understand how one might want to miss the opportunity to connect the schedule and the actual execution of the work and prefer to (manually) collect progress information to update the schedule across disconnected systems.

Having said that, maybe you should have a look at Jira Product Discovery. While Advanced Roadmaps - which @Antuan Sammak is referring to - is an excellent way to showcase the delivery roadmap (in detail or at a higher level to match the need of you C-level stakeholders), it does require all the work to be defined as issues. And I do believe that is a good way to approach things, but not what seems to be the approach you have in mind. Jira product discovery allows you to stay at the higher level of big things you want to accomplish and use views to organise those items:

• on a board as things to work on now > next > later
• on a timeline with start and end dates
• connected to delivery for those teams who do work in Jira (for those teams you can then use the delivery roadmap as well)

Big advantage is that you can share these views with your stakeholders.  

[Antuan Sammak]

Hi @Angela Highfill 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I have actually used to work with MS Project and migrated to Jira fully, the key is Advanced Roadmaps function and "Team" field in Jira.

from Advanced Roadmap you need to create different Teams and configure them according to your teams structure, and add the capacity to each one.

then follow the standards provided by Atlassian in terms of tickets creation https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes 

if you follow the above, then you will have a full view in Advanced Roadmap then use Group by Team that will help you to schedule tasks and manage capacity properly.

Advanced Roadmap has all functions of MSP in terms of dependency management and all is visual, also consider using Scenarios function which gives you the option to play around with your roadmap to test different options without affecting the main one.

[Angela Highfill]

Hi Antuan and thank you so much for these details.  I'll pose the same question to you that I posed to Walter.

My stakeholders for the program's schedule are internal corp execs and external customers primarily. We already know that the lowest-level engineering tasks, as well as higher-level tasks throughout this complex program, will not be consistently and reliably refreshed and managed. Given this, I would not rely on this underlying data to build a program schedule; I would be creating a high level program schedule independently of the work occuring day to day.  In other words, the request is to use Jira as a scheduling tool, much like MS Project is used.  My question is:  Can this be done effectively, and especially with the use of Jira plug-ins?  Do you have any experience with scheduling plug-ins?

[Antuan Sammak]

Hi @Angela Highfill 

thank you for explaining further.

what you are after can be done without having any external plugins.

you just need to create some initiatives (depends on how many projects you have running and size of each one) then create epics (in case you dont have ones already) and link those epics to the initiatives accordingly using Parent Link field.

create a filter in Jira that gets you only initiatives and epics (in case you dont want to see lower level details)

Head to advanced roadmap and create a plan based on the previous created filter.

in the roadmap, select dependency management view and make sure the below highlighted fields are showing. if not, click on Fields with an arrow next to it and add them

start by adding start/end date for each epic then add the relationship between them, like SF, SS, FS, FF.

of you course you can do the above for the Story level as well subtasks, depends to which level you want to see details in your plan. you can control that from your main filter you created to include what you need.

hope the above helps, please let me know in case you have any further questions and i would be happy to help.