Project management at high level

[Ruslan Berezyuk]

Hello, I'm looking for some suggestions about a situation we have right with Jira software. 

We started using Jira about a year ago. Since then the company grow and right now we have 20+ active projects on Jira. We are having a hard time managing all the open projects in Jira. What I would love to have is some kind of panel, dashboard, timeline, etc that includes all the active projects with some kind of high-level overview, maybe the workload by an engineer, active sprints with dates, etc. None of this is possible right now. 

I've explored few possible solutions. 

Advanced Roadmap from Jira premium was pretty promising. But all our projects are Next-Gen and are not supported in Advanced roadmaps (it's shame the "Next Gen" name is so misleading)

Jira Align also looks great for our needs but the pricing is a little bit out of our possibilities right now ($20-30k / yeah is just too high) 

So the only option we have is to use some App or Plugin. Since there hundreds of options on the Marketplace only a few of them are cross-project (ie most are designed to work on a single project). A couple I tested that actually are cross-project were so slow and buggy that I was even unable to finish my evaluation if they are useful for us. 

So I'm wondering if we are missing something? Any suggestion about how to have a "big picture" of several projects in Jira? Any suggestion is welcome! 

Thank you!! 

[Gorka Puente _Appfire_]

Hi @Ruslan Berezyuk

A common scenario for project tracking is by using Profields (I'm not affiliated with the vendor, DEISER, although we collaborate sometimes). This app allows you to visualize your project portfolio, no matter if you have +20 projects, you can have all the information at plain sight, then manage them.

As for the dashboard capabilities, we do develop a commercial app called Dashboard Hub for Jira (soon in Confluence too). This app allows you creating a full-fledge dashboard for your agile team using any of the provided templates, or by building your own. You have gadgets to visualize the workload of your engineers, active sprints, etc. You can see a live dashboard here https://bit.ly/AgileTeam_dashboard.

We are working with DEISER, the team behind Profields, to provide a template for project tracking. If you want more information ping me at gorka at roninpixels dot com.

Regards,

[Anna-BigPicture]

Hi @Ruslan Berezyuk

Let me add few works about BigPicture/BigGantt, which probably is the tool that will meet your expectations.
First of all, because of its flexible rules in defining a Program scope. The plugin allows users to create a defined collection of tasks based on a combination of multiple Jira projects, Jira Boards, or filters and display them all on the roadmap.
The setup's flexibility ensures you that a Box can be configured to contain exactly the tasks you need to fit your work, using narrowing down JQL Filter (limiting it to, e.g., epics only).
Moreover, you can track your projects' progress on a single Iteration level as well as on the PI/Program/Program Portfolio level. Please have a look at my picture.

Let me know if you have further questions. 

[Nico Frossard - codefortynine]

Hello @Ruslan Berezyuk,

Our Jira Cloud App Quick Filters for Jira should help managing and monitoring that many projects within Jira. It enables filtering a complete dashboard with one click. The filter options offered are very flexible and include filtering by project, user, sprint... basically anything that can be written with JQL.

In the screenshot below I created a few gadgets, and a "Quick Controller" for filtering them. The filters I defined in the Quick Controller allow me to filter my gadgets by project, priority, assignee, component and/or issues within the active sprint.

This means you only have to create the dashboard once, and can then use it to monitor all your projects and sprints very easily.

Don't hesitate to contact our support team if you want to know more!

[Andrew Kendris]

Hello @Ruslan Berezyuk !

Have you tried leveraging the power of the Jira Dashboard?  Our teams use Next-Gen projects exclusively and love them!

With dashboards, you can leverage different gadgets (with the help of basic JQL) to pull in all the data you want from across multiple projects and multiple teams.  This will give you a big picture on how your teams/projects are performing and help you proactively make business decisions.

Some examples of what's reports are possible:

• You can see how much work is "in progress" across multiple teams
• You can see how many tickets are overdue or due in one week
• You can see workload across a specific team
• You can see what tickets are flagged
• You can see a trend of resolutions

Off the top of my head I'm thinking the below could be useful gadgets to get you started:

• Created vs Resolved charts
• Two-dimensional diagrams
• Filter gadgets
• Pie charts
• Calendar

[Ruslan Berezyuk]

Thank you very much for all your answers! I will review try all solutions and check which one works better for me! 

I will back here and post my comments

Regards

Ruslan 

[Anna-BigPicture]

Hi @Ruslan Berezyuk

Please notice that some tools (BigPicture/BigGantt included) give you the possibility to install a trial version. That's a great opportunity to choose the plugin that will fully answer your needs. Have fun :)

[Caleb]

Ruslan,

Did you find a solution that works for you?