BigPicture Roadmap Questions

[Cher Sheldon]

Hello!

We are currently evaluating gantt plugins for JIRA and BigPicture is one of the best we've seen so far. We have a couple questions regarding the development roadmap for the tool itself:

• While being able to tell if a particular resource is overbooked is great and very intuitive in BigPicture, we run into trouble as teams get larger: Manually updating team member allocation becomes very time-consuming at scale. Do you have any plans to implement Microsoft Project-style resource leveling? That is, as a project manager I would like BigPicture to automatically adjust resource allocation based on resource type, capacity, task type, duration, and predecessor/successor relationships so that I don't have to update the schedule manually.
• We noticed that resource type / role definition sits behind the admin function wall and applies to all BigPicture programs within a given JIRA instance. This is fine for small instances, but becomes difficult to manage at scale. As a project manager, I would like to define teams, roles, and work schedule at the program or even team level so that...
• ...I can flexibly define constraints that fit my team / project.
• ...I don't need admin rights on the JIRA instance to make changes.

Any insight as to where you guys are headed next would be great.

[Matthew Jagiello]

First, MSP-like leveling will be introduced, it's already in our backlog: https://softwareplant.com/jira/browse/GANTT-255

As for the permissions issue, while adding new types of Roles is indeed in the global administration, to add Teams and assign existing Roles to resources you should not need JIRA admin rights. Admin of the Program itself (not all, just this particular one) in our plugin's permissions should suffice.

[AlexanderT]

5 years passed. How can the feature get scheduled to work?

[Anna-BigPicture]

Hi @AlexanderT

Thank you for posting this question. 

We use our best efforts to constantly develop BigPicture and adjust it to our clients’ diverse needs. 

There are two reasons why the feature 'Resource leveling like in MS Project' has not been realized so far. 

First of all, many future requests we receive from our clients result in the necessity to prioritize them and measure clients' demand. We have only recently reached a level of interest that is a trigger to schedule development works.

Second, the feature is very complex in terms of technology and requires a set of significant changes in our plugin's mechanism. 

The good news is that we plan to start works as early as next year. We hope you agree with us that it is worth waiting for good things, that is why we ask you for a little bit more patience. 

Best,

Anna

[AlexanderT]

Thanks, Anna.

"Next year" is at least somewhat better than "Postponed".

Since it's really a difficult feature I believe it'll take a lot of time for development and for polishing . So it might be useful to start preparatory work in advance.

I understand that there are other fancy requirements for SAFe etc, but this one provide you with huge reason for switching customers from MSP to BigPicture.

Good luck with the implementation ;)

Regards,

     Alex