Track the progress in Jira projects goes hand in hand with advanced resource planning. Resource planning in Jira includes various techniques such as planning future undertakings, scheduling project tasks, tracking resource utilization, and time spent.
ActivityTimeline is a resource planning tool integrated with Jira that encompasses all the mentioned features, making project progress tracking seamless. We will discuss how this plugin can enhance your project progress.
Why Tracking Progress is Important?
Tracking progress is important for accountability and transparency. It ensures that individuals and teams are held responsible for their tasks and commitments, and provides visibility into the status of projects. This promotes a sense of responsibility and fosters effective communication and collaboration among team members. Tracking progress also aids in planning and prioritization by assessing completed work and remaining tasks. It helps identify potential bottlenecks and allows for adjustments to stay on schedule. Additionally, tracking progress easiest performance evaluation and decision-making for enhancing productivity and addressing issues.
Jira Progress Tracking
Jira, a widely used project management tool, eases progress tracking by offering task management features. It allows for project tasks creation, assignment, and tracking in a centralized platform. Jira also supports custom workflows, enabling the tracking of tasks as they move through different stages. The tool provides reporting and metrics capabilities, generating visual reports to measure team productivity and project progress. Integration with other tools and platforms enhances collaboration and captures relevant information. In summary, Jira serves as a powerful tool for progress tracking, enabling effective project management and coordination of tasks and projects.
How to Visualize Project Progress in Jira?
As a manager, visualizing project progress in Jira is valuable because it provides a clear and concise overview of the project's status. It allows you to track the progress of tasks and projects in real-time, identify dependencies and potential risks, communicate effectively with the team and stakeholders, analyze performance metrics, and drive continuous improvement by identifying trends and areas for enhancement. Visualizing project progress in Jira helps you stay informed, make good decisions, and ensure the successful completion in project management. ActivityTimeline is a Jira resource planning plugin that provides all of the aforementioned features and allows one to track project progress effortlessly. Let's take a look at 5 key elements of successful project planning and project status tracking.
Plan Future Projects
The app provides a Planning dashboard with a cross-project view for shared resources. Observe all of the teams with team members, projects, and tasks. The managers can also establish project teams.
After some configuration magic, project teams will be created automatically by the system, based on the Jira data concerning people that work on the specific project.
Schedule Tasks for Your Project Teams
The next step is task list scheduling. Use left panel groupings and filters in order to find the needed tasks and projects:
After the preset project filters schedule issues from the left panel directly on the individual or team timelines:
Users can also create and schedule tasks directly from Jira. The data will be reflected in the ActiityTimeline automatically:
The third option is to create tasks & custom events directly from the dashboard:
With many tasks, you can have a helper – integration with a communication platform like Slack, for example. All issues go to the Slack channel and you stay up to date with each update.
Observe the Resource Utilization
ActivityTimeline provides special workload indicators aka status column, for your effortless Jira resource utilization tracking. These indicators are available for every user and for the team in general, so you can see the Jira workload by the assignee and team:
Progress is measured by the logged time on tickets and the remaining estimates. If no specific remaining estimate is specified, the original estimate is used instead.Enjoy the advanced Jira workload planning. Check whether Jira resources have been utilized to extend in order to be sure that the project will be delivered on time.
Story Points
If you use Story points, we recommend converting the task's estimation from story points to hours in order to utilize the Workload Indicator effectively to you. This conversion provides the project manager with an overview of the resource's overall capacity and availability and allows them to generate ActivityTimeline Resource Reports.Once the conversion factor is set, the system will calculate the workload for each person in hours based on the defined conversion factor for that project. For example, if 1 story point is approximately equal to 4 hours of work, a task estimated at 3 story points will be calculated as 12 hours.
Track Time Spent on Tasks
Timesheet tracking for Jira is a crucial part of project progress tracking. Use the app's timesheeting section to track the logged hours and time spent on the specific project:
Use Reports: Actual vs Planned
Reporting helps to evaluate the progress and reveal potential bottlenecks of your projects. With the help of the Actual vs Planned report, the project manager can compare expected results with the actual execution of tasks/projects.Choose a project, scope and team, time frames, and acceptable deviation, which shows to which extent your project can be delayed:
As for now, the manager can get a clear status report with all Jira data and see which Jira issues are problematic and can fix that. For example, the manager can talk with the employee and discover why he/she needs more time for the task, another way is to reassign the task or even split it between multiple users.
Conclusion
ActivityTimeline provides a variety of features for your successful project tracking and resource planning for all kinds of teams - from software development to high-level management. If you want to discover more useful planning tips in project management check out the following – How to improve Team Workload Management in Jira!
