Atlassian offers numerous solutions to tailor your PMO. Today we will present the simplest and most effective way to start and manage your projects within the Atlassian universe. Atlassian has built a dedicated project management solution, suitable for handling the daily work of teams, measuring resource capacity, tracking planning, and global reporting. Next, we will introduce the main steps to structure your PMO within Jira.
✈️ Fasten your seatbelts… immediate takeoff!
🛫 Defining Project Structure in Jira
First of all, it is important to define the structure of your projects in Jira. In Jira, you can choose to create one or more projects.
Example 1: I manage two independent projects in my company, one to track Marketing activities and a second to track the implementation of SAP; in this case, we recommend creating two different projects in Jira.
Example 2: I manage a team whose task is to launch Marketing campaigns and organize events to retain our customers; in this case, it makes sense to organize the two business projects under one Jira project.
Backlog Management for Prioritization, Planning, and Focus, and Permission Management
In Jira, backlog management is essential for prioritizing important projects. It allows teams to visualize all pending tasks, rank them in order of priority, and plan the most critical ones first. This ensures that resources are allocated to the most impactful projects.
Sprint planning in Jira helps focus on short-term goals. Teams can set the duration of sprints and choose the backlog tasks to complete, thus promoting an iterative and agile approach to project management.
Lastly, permission management in Jira is crucial for controlling access to sensitive information. Administrators can configure who has the right to view, modify, or add information in the project, protecting critical data and ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive project information.
🍹 Structuring Your Workflow
You can customize the workflow process and adapt it to your business activities.
This is presented under a specific scheme for each type of project; here are some examples of workflow schemes.
Example Scheme for a Support Team:
For a technical support team using Jira, the process starts with creating tickets for each support request received. These tickets are then prioritized based on their urgency and complexity. Jira allows defining rules to automatically sort tickets and assign them to technicians based on their expertise. This way, urgent issues are addressed first, and each technician is assigned tasks suited to their skills.
Workflow Scheme for a Library:
In the case of a library, Jira is used to manage inventory and plan promotional campaigns. For example, tasks can be created for stock monitoring, ordering new books, or organizing promotional events. Each task can be assigned to a team member and tracked to completion. Jira thus facilitates the coordination of commercial and marketing activities, aligning daily operations with the library’s strategic objectives.
💺 Gantt Chart Planning
Jira offers Gantt chart planning to provide a chronological view with task dependencies, helping you visualize ongoing work and meet project milestones. You can also see who is responsible for each defined task and when it should be completed. The schedule can be modified from this view by dragging and dropping tasks.
Gantt chart planning in Jira is a powerful tool for visual project management. It provides an overview of the project’s timeline, clearly showing the start and end of each task. This representation helps quickly identify task overlaps and potential resource conflicts. If two important tasks are scheduled simultaneously, the Gantt chart facilitates their adjustment to avoid conflicts and ensure optimal resource use. Additionally, it allows monitoring task progress against deadlines, helping teams stay on schedule.
🎛️ Task and Responsibility Assignment
Each team member is responsible for a task, contributing to team accountability and demonstrating each member’s contribution to project success. This also helps project managers manage resources and resolve issues in case of delays.
A task in Jira is represented by various elements: the title, content, due date, and person responsible for the work. It is also possible to add other fields and information specific to your business.
🛃 Activity Monitoring and Reporting
Jira’s reporting functionality helps maintain connection and monitor projects across the board, keeping you informed about milestones achieved and work completed/pending/finished, enabling managers to communicate with their teams while keeping control over key elements like resources, tasks, and deadlines.
The Jira Work Management summary view offers an overview of project activities and statistics to facilitate report creation. You can see a high-level summary of progress, activities, priorities, and workload.
Using Jira transforms project management by offering greater visibility into all project phases. Customizable dashboards and real-time activity monitoring keep teams informed and coordinated, avoiding redundancies and delays. Increased efficiency comes from better planning, optimized resource allocation, and smooth communication among team members. For those interested in discovering how Jira can revolutionize their project management, exploring its features or contacting us for a personalized demonstration is recommended.
Through this article, we hope to have provided you with a taste of project management in Jira, which you can build thanks to Jira’s flexibility into a very powerful PMO tool, adapted to your company and scalable.
🛬 Thank you for joining us on this journey, see you next time 🧑✈️
