How can I monitor how far behind and ahead a project is?

[Brendan Gray]

I want to be able to monitor how many hours/days/weeks a project is behind schedule, and see if it is behind or ahead. The time tracking report only tells me if the estimates were accurate. Also, if there is already a process/function for this, please can someone help me on best practice.

[Martin Hohenberg]

One observation on @Airbus Driver advice - sprints usually work in a metric called "story points", which comes from the SCRUM methodology. Some people may be inclined to assign "real-world values" to story points (e.g. "1 story point = 1 man-hour"). This is generally considered to be a bad approach that counteracts the method and will lead to frustrations in the team further down the line, if you ever plan to implement agile methodologies in your team. 

You might want to look into Agile Roadmaps, which gives you a quasi-GANTT-Chart, can be configured to show a calendar-style progress report and which is easy to use as a project controlling tool: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management/roadmaps.

If you want a "hard number", you may be better served with a BI tool, like eazyBI https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management/roadmaps - One of the challenges you will find when approaching this problem in eazyBI is that issues get started, and finished, and often enough re-started, so you'll have to define which "hours spent" interval makes most sense to you.

Be aware that neither of them are exactly "easy, drop-in solutions" and will require some tinkering with - so it's probably best to think hard what metric you want, and why, before you invest time in this.

[Lauma Cīrule]

Hi @Martin Hohenberg and @Brendan Gray!

Thanks for suggesting eazyBI! If you wish to look at what eazyBI can do regarding the Project time tracking, here are some example reports https://eazybi.com/accounts/1000/dashboards/27385-time-tracking.

Should you decide to go further and need any assistance with your particular report, please do not hesitate to contact support@eazybi.com.

Lauma / support@eazybi.com

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Brendan Gray 

Would you please describe:

• how your team is working (waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, something else);
• which features of Jira you are using (company-managed projects, team-managed, roadmaps, addons, time keeping, estimation, etc.); and
• what you mean by "behind schedule" or "ahead".  For example, is the idea of "behind schedule" based upon date fields in Jira issues, relative to the forecasts (original estimate), or some known point-in-time not stored in the issues, etc.?

Knowing these things may help the community to offer you ideas.  Thanks!

Best regards,
Bill

[Brendan Gray]

Hi there,

We are working in scrum, with company-managed projects. And behind and ahead refers to the amount of hours that someone has spent on a task. We want to measure the amount of hours that tasks take, versus how long we thought they would take. So we want to know how far under or over the estimated time we got. The tracking time report is very close to what we need. It just doesn't specify if our accuracy is over or under the estimated amount.

[Brendan Gray]

So if someone thought that I task was going to take them 100hrs, but they have spent 80hrs on it, and think that it will still take another 50hrs, I want the system to recognize that and show that the task is going to be 30hrs over.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for clarifying, Brendan, and...I would hope that specific measure would only be valuable for a few weeks, and so perhaps consider not building/buying anything too elaborate to support this.  Maybe even measure it manually, or just review the built-in time tracking reporting to see how that helps.

I suggest this because when a team discovers something took much longer (or much less time) than expected, that is valuable info.  They can pause, figure out what was different about the task leading to the original estimate, and use that learning to inform future forecasting.  As forecasting accuracy improves, the value to measure it decreases...other things/issues become more important to watch and measure.

[Airbus Driver]

You might have to consider using the Sprints feature - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/sprints 

You can then track your progress using different charts, one of them being Burndown Charts