NextGen vs Classic

Johnny Guzman November 13, 2020

Hi Everyone..  my organization has been on Classic for almost two years and we recently acquired a company that has been using NextGen.  We want everyone on the same version and although I see high-level feedback on features I would appreciate your feedback if you shifted from Classic to NextGen or vice versa.  I'm curious why you shifted and if there are key differences I need to keep in mind when aligning the org.  I do know NextGen is what I would call lightweight jira for ease of use and so projects can be spun up quickly.  I have used Classic for years and I am very familiar at Admin'ing and using as an engineer.  Thank you!

5 comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 13, 2020

My experiences have been poor I'm afraid.  For simple projects which fit within Next-gen capabilities, it has been great.

But for projects that need flexibility, Next-gen simply is not ready.  It's missing so many things that classic projects do.  Most of the power of the workflows is not there, even when you've got Automation added to it, you can only have one sub-task type, estimates do not roll up to a parent, and and and and and...

When someone needs a new project, I will offer Next-gen first, but most people need functions that classic has and Next-gen does not (yet).  It is improving, but I still can't recommend it to anyone who has got used to what classic projects can do.

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Jimmy Seddon
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November 13, 2020

Hey @Johnny Guzman,

Nic is bang on.  I have worked at two different companies that both use a mix of Classic and Next-Gen.  Next-Gen ends up getting used for experimental R&D proof of concepts while we have always used classic for everything that goes to production.  As a say this, Next-Gen is constantly having features added to it, so it's always worth checking back every so often to see if there is something that you make you consider changing your mind. 

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Johnny Guzman November 13, 2020

Thank you both!

Emily Chan
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 14, 2020

Hi @Johnny Guzman

We're currently doing research on understanding more about customers who are currently using both Classic and Next-gen project types at the same time. Would you help us learn more about you and your use cases? We're also interested to understand more about your contemplation to move forward with only one project type.

A one-hour chat with you would be immensely helpful, and we’ll send you a $100 gift card as thanks. If you’re interested, please email me at echan@atlassian.com.

John Price
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November 17, 2020

I work in a large company and we have not enabled Next-gen for users.  Based on my tests:

Pros:

* Much nicer UI for users and project admin

* More control by project admins vs. central admin team - this is a big one.  My small Jira admin team does not love getting 1 zillion requests for custom fields, etc.

* Combining board columns and workflows into one thing is a great simplification.  

Cons:

*The central admin screens for fields, etc. are not properly next-gen aware yet.  I'm fine with project admins creating a bunch of stuff but I need to see that all in one place.

* project-level custom fields seem like a good idea until 30 different teams create a field called "Client Name".  They all show up in JQL search and I found at least one bug where a saved filter behaved differently for 2 users depending on which "Client Name" it decided to use by default.

* Once you have every team making their own fields and workflows, centralized reporting is not gonna happen :-)

Long-term I think this is the right direction.  I just want the answer to "how do I give more power to project admins without letting things get completely out of hand?"

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Johnny Guzman November 18, 2020

Thank you John!

Walter Buggenhout
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November 21, 2020

Hi @Johnny Guzman,

Thanks for creating a really valuable discussion thread. I'll have to go with most comments fellow community members have been making here.

As an Atlassian consultant, I have assisted many customers over the last couple of years implementing Jira based solutions around ITSM, Project and Portfolio Management and collaboration in all kinds of environments. From that experience, as soon as you go beyond the single team / single project level, next-gen is simply a no go.

@John Price makes a great summary of the next-gen pros in his comment above: it's all slick, simple to set up and understand in terms of configuration, so you can leave it in the hands of your project admins.

As soon as you get to teams running multiple projects, organisations running multiple teams and trying to consolidate that information into management insights and consolidated reporting, you will find that using next-gen just creates isolated silos for each and every project defined in your instance. On top of all examples already mentioned in try building a report on status across multiple next-gen projects, like you can see here:

Screenshot 2020-11-21 at 11.54.05.png

Even though you may have defined the same statuses in your projects, they are completely separated from one another. And even reporting as simple as this is impossible to consolidate without either marketplace apps or additional data processing outside of the system.

How I think of it is next-gen is a great playground (for Atlassian) to experiment with. We have seen the roadmap as a nice and graphically appealing feature emerge from next gen projects and being introduced into classic projects at the later stage. And it may also be a great playground for some of your teams as well, as long as they stand on their own.

However, as soon as you need to collaborate across teams and projects, stick to classic. Thinking from the perspective of a team (rather than a project), consistency across your projects is vastly beneficial to your user experience and onboarding e.g. of new team members. Being able to set up a single board for your team with a centralised view across all of their projects is too.

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Johnny Guzman November 23, 2020

Thank you for weighing in Walter.

John Price
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November 29, 2020

I think it would help to have some guides in next-gen that encourage users to re-use standard fields and other objects, or maybe a way to let them create and share configurations.  I don't have a great solution.  

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