Jira Project Templates - BigTemplate

[Raymond J Wohltman]

Hello,

We're a MS Project Server user and are migrating towards Jira, and would like to port our MS Project schedules over to Jira, (BigPicture/BigGantt). That topic will be addressed separately. 

We are also looking to develop a few project templates like you can in project, and use them to create new waterfall projects in Jira.

I am proficient in MS Project Server, but a newbie with respect to Jira. We're interested in BigPicture because it looks to be a complete PPM solution through its product offering.

Any assistance would be gratefully appreciated. 

Thanks, Ray Wohltman

[Hamza Chundrigar]

Hi Raymond,

This sounds like an interesting migration. I have many thoughts and insights regarding your post. The whole migration process should happen in a very calculated phased approach, with each phase having multiple factors and considerations to take into account.

We use BigPicture (which is integrated with our Jira Instance) for our various PPM needs. It is definitely a robust tool. The learning curve is steeper than the vast majority of apps I've come across in the Atlassian Marketplace — which makes sense due to its extensive portfolio that is flexible enough to help you build any structure you can pretty much think of, such as portfolios, sub-portfolios, programs, projects stages, SAFe® Product Increments (PI), etc. Not to mention, with BigPicture the MS project-like Gantt view will be very familiar to anyone who is used to/coming from MS projects.

Of course, as you might be able to appreciate, you (or your team) won't be able to import your MS Project files directly in BigPicture without setting up JIRA (to a certain degree). To carry out the import successfully, at the very minimum, you need to define a Jira project where the imported issues should be created. Tasks are visualized in the App and they have to exist somewhere in Jira itself. This goes the same for BigTemplate.

There are some Atlassian Marketplace apps that may ease the process for you and your team in your migration. For instance, Ceptah Bridge - JIRA MS Project Plugin might be worthwhile looking into.

This may be an oversimplification, but in essence — Prior to installing BigPicture/BigTemplate, once you've setup a project in Jira with your desired configurations in which issues can be imported, you would be able to create an export of your MS Project Schedules and then import the file — granted that you'll need to define the columns accordingly that which is corresponding to the imported data.

In order to load your data into Jira, say from a CSV File — feel free to check out this article for more details.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Best regards,

Hamza