Using Jira Software for Project Management - anyone else?

[Alex Saunders]

Does anyone else want to to share successes or lessons learned with Jira Software as a PM function separate from software development??

[Kalin U]

I could share a few observations about Jira for project management:

• the structure of work needs to be articulated to the team and documented, e.g. Epic > Task > Sub-task (3 levels), or Component > Epic > Task > Sub-task (4 levels, with Component not being visible in the hierarchy)
• the team needs a visual way to track planned work - think of timelines (roadmaps) and not an all-purpose Kanban board
• the PM needs reporting and Jira doesn't deliver any useful out-of-the-box tools when it comes to non-dev teams or practices; one needs to install a reporting tool from the Marketplace (or build one, or sync data to a BI tool)
• non-dev teams should be trained to think of epics as "projects" and components as "categories"; otherwise the terms don't make any sense, though they're super useful for reporting and visualizing
• tracking progress through time tracking is very useful, so if you have a time budget on a project, you can see how much has been exhausted ("actual" vs "estimated")

I still prefer Jira Software over Jira Work Management for non-dev project management because JS is much more versatile, supported and scalable than JWM.

[Alex Saunders]

Thanks Kalin we're expanding use of Jira software across teams and the hierarchy we have available in the standard product is fine for now, we can see the value of additional layer in Premium but it's not holing us back so far,

Timelines and Kanban have been the most helpful to date and we're trying some JQL filters to create views across projects in boards for collaboration purposes,

Time tracking is where I would like to know how much value you get out based on what data/criteria you need to enter as an analyst so the picture is clear higher up....its not obvious to me how to make that leap and exploit the tool vs using stand-ups and other comms to assess workload.

I'd be keen to know of your experience

Thanks

[Adriana Almeida da Cruz]

Hi Kalin,

What reporting tool do you recommend?

I created a project for procurement management, and it has been working well using Kanban. JWM seemed less complex to the team, but reporting has been a challenge. I've been using the filters and the system's dashboard itself, but I'd appreciate it if you have a more complete tool to recommend.
Also, do you recommend any time tool for tracking progress through time tracking?

Thank you very much!

[Jeania Kimbrough]

I would love a calendar feature in Jira Software like you have in Work Management and if it was something like Smartsheet it would be even better

[Kalin U]

Hey, @Alex Saunders and @Adriana Almeida da Cruz 

I second your experience. The JQL filters are great and some users think of them as "reports" to export to Excel, so in some projects we placed them in the Shortcuts section of the project navigation bar.

In terms of time tracking, we have used Tempo Timesheets and its reporting functionality. I can recommend the app as it gives nuances to the time tracked: 1) which account (customer) this work is for, 2) whether it is billable, 3) which team has contributed the most in any given period for any given account.

For more general reports, a Jira dashboard may be sufficient: with Tempo's widgets, some JQL filters and third-party (Marketplace) plugins specifically created for reporting.

Outside dashboards, I can recommend JXL for Jira - users love how easy it is to work with Jira issues in a spreadsheet format. Unlike the built-in Jira filters, JXL gives us some structure to the list of issues, e.g. grouping by customer, assignee, along with conditional formatting (e.g. estimate has been exceeded or the issue overdue).

I'm confident that one can easily sync Jira data to Power BI (by Microsoft) or Tableau (by Salesforce) as well - these are the industry standard for data viz. I've seen several apps that promise to deliver this. Even Atlassian announced Atlassian Analytics for cloud enterprise customers.

[Teodora V]

One of my favorite topics @Alex Saunders 

I've always been using Jira as a PM tool and am stumbling across more use cases and possible usage scenarios. 

In this article, I described a bit of the Jira usage in our Marketing team :) 

[Alex Saunders]

Thanks Teodora I haven't used components at all so this could be a useful first step, your illustration of progress is very appealing.

Thanks for the article!