Can Jira be used for Construction Management??

[Trevor Coyle]

Hello Jira users,

I would love to know if anyone has any creative applications for using Jira as a construction management tool.. Or other alternatives?

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Trevor Coyle 

The short answer is... yes, it can. The longer answer is... longer.

I have come to see Jira as a process management tool rather than just a development tool. In my instance, I have the developer cycle (duh) but also all the Creatives, Legal, Finance, etc running their processes in there. It took a metric ton of work to build out stuff that made them happy and hid all the complexities from them but it's paid off.

The key to this, as you think about how to mold Jira to being construction management, will be to think of the various elements and, regardless of the "name", think of their semantic meaning and how they fit with your realm. A brief set of examples might be:

• Components -> your construction components such as "framing", "HVAC", "Electrical"
• Fix Version(s) -> a grouping of things released at a given time
• Assuming you look at "Sprints", could be short cycle construction phases
• Epic -> a grouping of tasks to deliver a Thing.

That is just a brief look but, all the above said, if you don't have other uses for Jira in your realm, it might be better to look for a tool that explicitly does Construction Management. While you could easily leverage Jira to do the job if you already have it in house for other stuff, it'll take work but the nice bit is that you have a single place where all your company's source of truth is. If you don't have it in place, a bespoke tool for Construction Management will likely have a lot of the pre-work done for you and use terms that are both semantically the same and named the same as your contexts.

[Trevor Coyle]

Great response Mike. Thank you!

[mahbub.morshed]

@Mike Rathwell 

Do you know anyone who has actually used JIRA Cloud for entire home building project? It would be good to see how that is done. I am trying to internalize the concept of JIRA by going through how JIRA could be used for construction management.

@Trevor Coyle 

Trevor, did you end up using JIRA for construction management? It would be good if you can share your experience. 

[Kat]

The Phoenix Project is a novel that follows someone as they learn the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook by looking at how a manufacturing plant works and applying it to IT.

There are a lot of parallels between engineering, manufacturing, and supporting physical widgets and software code.

[Mike Rathwell]

@Kat , that book should be required reading for anyone involved with living in, operating, or configuring a process. And you hit the nail on the head which can be summed up with, "A process is a process is a process."

Using that mindset I have my instance supporting not only the devs but also the creative teams, legal, finance, merch, etc... and all of them have not gotten to where they cannot imagine living without it and the power for me to make it just the way they want it.

As one of the creative project managers said, "You gave me my lunch hour back"

[Kat]

The fiction format also makes learning the concepts really accessible. Even quality text books can be dry to read.