CLOSED Ask Me Anything (AMA): Project management at scale with Design Lead James Rotanson

[Abby Stiris]

UPDATE: It's a wrap for our first community AMA on Jira Work Management. Thanks to everyone for taking part and sharing. Feel free to keep the discussion going!

Share your questions now

Hi JWM Community!

Whether you have Project Management in your job title or something totally different, working as a team takes coordination, planning, and follow through. Let’s talk about how to work better together from anywhere.

Jira Work Management’s very own Design Lead, James Rotanson (@Roto) is LIVE right now to answer all of your questions about project management at scale.

From workflow recommendations to JWM tips to anything in between, James is live in the JWM Community sharing his expert answers.

Submit questions below👇, upvote others' submissions, and chat with James as he answers anything and everything about collaborative work.

[John Funk]

James is the man!! Excited for this!

My question would be around open items in the JAC and when they might be done. Specifically, I see a lot of questions about being able to control Done items on the board. I can provide a wish list.  :-)

[roto]

What an honour, from the @John Funk ! Looking forward to this and bring on your wish list :) 

[John Funk]

Here's a question first - There seems to be some confusion now as to whether Jira Work Management is included in the Jira Software product subscription, or whether they are now two separate products requiring two separate subscriptions and payments. 

Part of the confusion is from the new migration tool from Server to Cloud that requires you to have the JWM product license if you have Jira Server Core projects. 

Can you clarify? 

[roto]

Hi @John Funk 

You can buy Jira Work Management by itself (Free or Standard) or you can also get it for free if you are already using Jira Software / Jira Service Management. 

Hopefully this clarifies your question!

[John Funk]

Thanks, James - that's very helpful!

[John Funk]

Here's my list  :-)

These are the top vote getters in the JAC for JWM:

[roto]

Haha sounds like a Christmas list ;) I'll try to give an answer to tickets that I know:

• JWMCLOUD-30 Epics and Stories. You can already do this by creating custom issue types under project settings. Epic needs to be added manually and not already available by default as we found that the majority of our users are confused by the concept and terminology. However, we still want to make sure admins / power users have access to this and retain the power so this is where we make it optional. 
• JWMCLOUD-88 Width resize. Fair point, we found two types of preferences here. The original "fit everything into one screen" gets really unwieldy as at some point the individual cards get squished so much that you're unable to even see the content of the card anymore. We'll investigate this one more. 
• JWMCLOUD-19 / JWMCLOUD-21 Configure board clearing. This is planned in our roadmap. Stay tuned :) 
• JWMCLOUD-111 / JWMCLOUD-266 Timeline nesting. Seems to be a bug, we'll look into this. 
• JWMCLOUD-52 Timeline start / end date issue. Same, seems to be a bug, will follow up. 
• JWMCLOUD-23 More than 1000 issues in board. This is more of a technical limitation right now. The good news is this limit does not apply to List / Timeline view. 
• JWMCLOUD-29 More fields on form. We're actually looking into this but not only for forms but also for the other views as well (particularly List). What sort of field types are you after and why?
• JWMCLOUD-34 Multiple boards. This is only at the exploration stage at the moment. What sort of use cases are you trying to solve with having multiple boards? How do you expect this to work with other views?
• JWMCLOUD-152 Attachment field. We actually did a spike on this for innovation week. Stay tuned!
• JWMCLOUD-25. Swimlanes. We got something better for you, board grouping (pivot boards) will be available soon and you'll be able to view your columns by assignee, priority, and other eligible field criteria. 

[Jimi Wikman]

My question is why Atlassian keep referring to task management as "Project Management"? As far as I know, Atlassian does not have Project Management features in any of their tools?

There are plenty of team based planning and of course Advanced roadmaps give a larger view of that if you build it, but these are not project management tools?

What are the plans for things like finance, budgets and resource planning at project level and at scale? Will we see things like risk management in an official Atlassian tool anytime soon?

While we have product goals in product discovery and strategic goals in Jira Align, there is no coherent way to connect work with the complete chain from vision to strategy to goals to deliveries. Will that come in the future and if so, how will projects tie into that as opposed to business areas or maintenance?

What I know many project managers still use Excel for is an overview of all the team members, with their hourly cost connected to a timespan that provides the financial overview. This is then used to calculate actual cost for the project and the cost of delay when things happen in the project. This is one of the most important tools for a project manager and it is one that does not exist today as far as I know. Will we see something like that in the future?

This is also very important for business areas that work with annual budgets, where the Agile work is mostly done. The cost of discovery always need to be monitored to ensure value is created, but also so the budget will cover the expenses for that business area.

So if the idea is to have Project Management, then there are almost no tools available today in Atlassian tools. If you want initiative monitoring or planning in general, then you have your timelines and Gantt and that is probably enough, unless you need it at scale.

[Michal H.]

well, I agree  and that is why we bought Bigpicture tool for Project management. But honestly Jira should work around more free tools for project management and solve some child limitations of fields and forms. But without Jira we can exist I have to say... :-)

[Jimi Wikman]

100% agree with this.

[roto]

Wow @Jimi Wikman  love your take and thanks for writing in such detail for this topic. 

Why call it project management?

Honestly, what we found through research is there are just so many different take on project management that even various teams within the same organisation / company (especially larger ones) define the term “project” vastly differently (to our surprise!).

Multiple projects and goals

Having said that, we are definitely committed to building more functionalities that helps teams to manage multiple projects. This starts from being able to navigate between them in an easier way compared to today (see this post), and we are currently further doing concept tests on being able to flexibly aggregate data across multiple projects. The other good news is that we are also planning the work for better integration with Atlas where you can ladder up your tasks and projects to the strategic / product / any goals. Stay tuned!

Project financials

As for budgeting, resourcing, and financial part of running a project, you’re right - this is something that we have not yet been able to support and appreciate you raising this question.  However, we’d love to be able to keep in touch with you and find out more about your specific needs as we gather more interest on this topic.

Hope this helps!

[Sami Ahmed Shaik]

Hello there,

• We are seeking JWM unlimited storage subscription, as of now there are only 2 options available “Free & Standard”, any plans to introduce JWM Premium with unlimited storage subscription?
• What are the best JSW (Server) —> JWM migration options? 
  
  
• Difference between JSW vs JMW? (Seeking to know key differences)?

• What are the key differences users may expect if migrated from JSW Software (server) —> JWM?

Regards,

Sami Ahmed Shaik.

[roto]

- Great question, we're definitely looking into more plans and pricing option for Premium and Enterprise in JWM. No key dates yet though. Anything other than storage that matters most to your team?

- Atlassian's Cloud Migration assistant would be your best bet

- JSW has very specific agile functionality such as Backlog, Sprints, agile reports, etc. and methodology such as Scrum and Kanban that are very optimised for agile software development teams. We found these to be a barrier to entry for majority of business teams who aren't yet familiar with these concepts / structure, hence why JWM focuses more on general purpose views such as List, Calendar, Board, Timeline etc. 

- Some of the JSW specific functionality might not be available in JWM (See my previous point). However, the data should remain intact. 

Hope this helps!

[Barbora Kořánová]

Hello, do you think it could be recorded? For someone with CET time it is challenging to participate. Thanks a lot. 

[Abby Stiris]

Hi Barbora, thanks for asking! This is an online event only with no live video component, so feel free to drop your questions in now and check back in to see the answers on Friday. 

[Kalin U]

Hi. How JWM can be useful for the C-level management of mini-teams? Here's our thinking: each team works in their own Jira project, but the C-level manager wants to see the big picture from all of the JWM projects. Any suggestions?

[roto]

Hi @Kalin U , great question. You can utilise the Dashboard feature in Jira and create gadgets / widgets that is powered by JQL. In the JQL query you can include multiple business projects and then use that to effectively feed the data to the gadget, which you can then present to the C-Level manager for a high level overview.

Hope this helps!

[AMIN EL]

How could we please demonstrate for you our jwm setup because it is a game changer for your design philosophy.... 

[Abby Stiris]

Happy to chat about this Amin! I'll reach out directly.

[Haddon Fisher]

The man\myth\legend @John Funk touched on this a bit but:

Can you talk a bit about how features are put on your roadmap? JAC has a lot of good requests for things that seem obviously needed and not hard to deliver on...but don't seem to get done. 

I guess my other question is a bit more tactical: There are a lot of features that seem to be pigeonholed into one or the other Jira "flavors" but have general appeal (workflow approval, forms, user-facing ticket portals) - can you talk a bit about why this keeps happening, and what plans (if any) there are to begin releasing these more generally?

[Move Work Forward]

Hi @Roto 

This is Leo. One quick question.

How do you manage release notes at scale?

Thanks,
Leo

[Jimi Wikman]

@Move Work Forwardwhat do you mean release notes on scale? Is it a rollout you mean?

Release notes are per system so there would be one for each system and possibly a document in Confluence for a project release or rollout?