Customising Jira for non-software based product development projects...

[Tony Palmer]

I am a project manager for (non-software) product development projects for the mining industry.  We have traditionally used waterfall project management methods but have recently started to introduce Agile techniques into the way we run our projects.  We use the roadmapping tool Aha! and have recently started to use Jira.  I am endeavouring to find the right balance between waterfall and Agile to suit our projects.  I am interested to know if there are others out there in the Atlassian community in a similar situation.  if so maybe we can collaborate to get the best out of Jira for our projects and project teams...

[Andrew McGuire]

@Tony Palmer just wondering if you have discovered a good way to implement Jira for your non-software related needs. I am beginning to use Jira and would be interested to hear how you are doing currently with balancing agile techniques. 

[Tony Palmer]

Hi Andrew yes we continue to persevere with Jira but there are many aspects that we find quite frustrating and unfortunately we have not had much support when we have reached out to Altlassian for help.  Jira will only filter for Stories, there is no ability to filter Versions or Epics.  This is a feature that even the software users have been asking for for years.  Having a true Version/Epic/Story filterable hierarchy would seem to be an obvious functionality but frustratingly it does not exist.  This has been a major impediment to our ability to use Jira for non-software projects.

To be fair though we do have a constraint in that we want to integrate Jira with the product management and roadmapping tool Aha!.  For this to happen smoothly with minimal manual admin the integration has to be set up in certain ways.  I won't go into that unless you are using Aha!.

It becomes difficult when we want to have multiple Versions within a Jira project but could be easily solved by having the ability to filter for Versions, Epics and Stories.  We have an approach that works but it is not ideal.

When we have only one Version per Jira Project it is easier but it would still be nice if the Epics would filter out.

Regards,

Tony

[Andrew McGuire]

Thank you very much for reaching back out and taking the time to respond. I am finding Jira to be completely be more than what we would really need at least in what our needs will be starting off. It looks well laid out from the first glance, but turned out to be more complex in how scenes and schemes needed to be laid out and certain associations needed to be made. I would have run into troubles in trying to implement. Again, thank you for the added info. 

[Tony Palmer]

You might want to give the new Jira next-gen project format a go as it is supposed to be much easier to use.  We looked at it but lack of Sub-tasks is a show stopper for us at the moment.

Regards,

Tony

[Amir Morshedian]

Hi Gentlemen,

This is a very interesting subject to me. I am coming from many years of developing electronics hardware with integrated software and have always used waterfall methodology and MS.Project

Recently I have started to study agile and  trying to find a hybrid method. We use Jira and I'd like to know more what you have achieved and learned in the past 3 years.

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge and experience

Best regards,

Amir