Background – Current Status
Over the years, Agile has brought great things to software project management. With its rise, the abilities for faster, shorter, and higher frequency releases increased development velocity significantly. Jira is one of the main tools being used to manage high velocity teams. It covers various DevOPS aspects and allows controlling and analyzing the team’s short term operation.
However, software teams with amazing velocity found out that Jira capabilities are not enough. Velocity is really great, but visibility became an issue. Furthermore, the amount of tickets and the digitization of software development tasks conceal the path forward. Other tools are required to see a higher level picture and make Jira even better.
The Gap
The gap that is created when using Jira alone impacts the day-to-day work of software teams in several ways.
Short term execution vs. longer term planning and tracking
Management and product leaders are seeking structural ways of building roadmaps. They have customer commitments, product vision, and goals. They don’t have such capabilities in Jira. At the same time, the software teams are effectively and efficiently using Jira to perform tasks for this week and next week. A significant conflict is created.
Working in silos, missing cross team coordination
Software teams never work as a standalone. There are always research and approval processes preceding the first line of code. Other non-software activities are required to run in parallel to coding and, of course, concurrently with release and customer delivery processes.. All these critical work streams are not in Jira, but still should be managed collaboratively with the development process.
Last but not least, Resources Management
A short term view for roadmaps, can yield only short term resources analysis, makes it impossible to ensure resources availability in the longer term.
The Solution
A modern system that can bridge between velocity and visibility
Such a system must seamlessly work with Jira, and at the same time, meet the needs and expectations of other teams not using Jira. This approach ensures access to all Jira great features, and provides project management capabilities to make it a better solution overall.
Bridging this gap is not a trivial challenge. The more teams are invested in adapting advanced Agile methodologies the bigger the challenge they face when trying to create decent visibility and project management capabilities. Agile is so modern and is such a powerful methodology, that traditional solutions for project management are simply left behind.
This gap is a core challenge of modern software project management, and resolving it is critical for success. Here are the main elements required for that:
Seamless Agile monitoring and Roadmap delivery projections
The tool must be designed to help you deliver larger pieces of work, get better visibility into your projects, analyze team capacity, and share project status across your organization.
It can’t force target dates into Jira, since doing that is affecting the agility of the Scrum operation method. Instead it should use the Agile progress information as-is to drive innovative monitoring schemes. The great velocity Agile can bring coupled with a great management visibility offers a winning combination.
Ensure that resources are available to support your goals
Analyzed per individual developer or per team, the tool must help you avoid overcommitting your teams and plan ahead efficiently. Such capability should include an accurate view of story point or loading percentages, so you can ensure that the right resources are available to support your goals and quickly determine the availability of resources.
Opening a window into Jira
The tool must be connected to Jira in full sync. With such integration, a manager is getting an intelligent monitoring of project schedule vs. the development progress as reported in Jira. The information is synced into the project plan without the need to go into Jira and look for the relevant data.
Teams on the same page
Software projects are more than just developers writing a code. Requirements need to be gathered, product definitions need to be written, and research, effort assessment, management approval, QA, customer success, deployment, release, and more have to be incorporated. The tool must allow capturing, planning and tracking all that. Capturing coding tasks alone is not enough.
3 Simple Steps to Implementing this Approach
Proggio’s newest Jira integration makes it possible for you to implement such an approach and better manage software projects in 3 simple steps.
Step 1 – Plan
Planning software development timelines around release dates and their contents. It is highly recommended to add related work done by non-software teams: marketing, compliance, Alpha and Beta plans, etc. Each project timeline is automatically added into a portfolio.
Step 2 – Link and Sync
Connect Proggio to Jira using Jira’s most secure application link, set by a Jira Admin. Once connected, link Proggio objects with Jira issues. Linked items (Releases, Epics, Tasks or even a JQL) are being updated on both sides.
A single ProjectMap™ on Proggio, synced with Jira
Step 3 – Track and Analyze
Proggio’s progress monitoring is based on the information synced from Jira. It is presented with an issue table and a monitor, showing completed, on track or delayed sign. In addition Proggio pulls resource assignments and effort points from various projects to show a clear and visual resource management matrix in the longer term.
About Proggio
This white paper is brought to you by Proggio – an innovative patented solution for Software project management.
Over the past 3 years we were talking to many leading development managers in software companies. We learned that these teams are following certain steps to create efficient software project management processes. We designed our solution around the guidelines detailed above and the real life lesson of these leading companies. Some of the companies were deeply involved in the process as design partners.