Updating and Baseline on Gantt Cloud

Trevor Durity January 30, 2015

Hello, I am quite new to Jira and Atlassian in general, having done most of my project scheduling and tracking on MS Project over the years. I notice some things are done very differently, e.g.

JIRA and Gantt Cloud calculates the percentage completion of any task based on the work log. The side-effect is that I cannot find a way to update the project and keep baselines intact. e.g. have a look at the attached Gantt for a hypothetical project, particularly the 2nd, 3rd and 4th tasks.

So today is the 30th of January. I have a task NIPTIMS-9 that should have finished a couple of weeks ago but will slip for another couple of weeks (an extreme example I know). The problem is that even if I have a blocking relationship with subsequent tasks that they will still be marked as starting as soon as the estimate runs out, e.g. NIPT-30 starts weeks too early. This was easy to do in MS Project as one could mark a percentage complete for a task and recalculate. The only ways to emulate this in Gantt Cloud AFAIK is to keep increasing the "Remaining Time" in the task to extend the end date, but that completely messes up the estimate reports. Another way would be to move the start date of a task, but then we lose baselining information.

I'm sure it's just my understanding of the system that is at fault and that I am missing something quite basic. Would greatly appreciate if anyone could shed some light on the issue.Baselining.jpg

2 answers

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Adrian Wieczorek February 2, 2015

Hi Trevor,

Many thanks for your feedback. The problem you are facing is pretty common for users who are converting from MS Project. As you already noticed, JIRA itself is slightly different and so is the Gantt Cloud. AFAIK, your problem can be brought down into this two main points:

  1. Yo don't have "baseline" information for tasks in JIRA/Gantt Cloud, you loose it as soon as you move the task start date. 
  2. Setting task's end dates based on their estimates/worklog does not work very well when tasks are overdue or put on hold.

The solution for point 1 would be to keep the baseline along with issues, likely as a separate custom field. I will think about possible implementation as it indeed might be useful.

As for progress tracking, we really like the idea of using buil-in JIRA time tracking capabilities for Gantt rendering. There are however some variations already planned, for example, some users would appreciate to have the ability to use due-dates (or any other pre-defined dates) as task's end dates and skip all calculations based on estimates/worklog:

https://wisoft.atlassian.net/browse/GANTT-121

There are other possible solutions as well, such as using story points (for those who really want the mix of agile approach with gantt rendering) etc. However, if you have any other ideas on how we can improve here, just let me know.

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Trevor Durity February 5, 2015

Hi Adrian,

Many thanks for the reply. Sorry for the delay - I didn't see the response till now.

Your solution to point 1 definitely sounds like a good idea. Just some custom field that can be used to have a mark on the Gantt to show originally scheduled dates/effort would be great from a reporting point of view so that we can quickly view where slippages occur (and hopefully improve processes in those areas).

I understand what you mean about different people wanting different behaviours wink Using Due Date as end date was something I was thinking about as well. It could be a pretty good solution as one could rearrange tasks quite quickly. It's more "manual" but gives us PMs quite a bit more control.

I'll keep an eye on the next few versions. All in all Gantt cloud is a very nice addition to JIRA.

All the best,

Trevor

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