Project Planning right tool - JIRA + Smartsheet Integrator Vs. JIRA Advance Roadmap

[Sunita Mathew]

Hi All,

Just joined this community and hope to get to know you all :) I have been managing IT projects for few years now and the choice of tools have been MS project and recently Smartsheet. However the current project I am managing is for Digital-Ecomm and our Product & Dev team use JIRA , delivery is 2 weeks sprint.

However we do have defined scope & fixed time to deliver this project. So we have 2 versions of truth :) we have the project plan in Smartsheet that is high-level milestone based but the sprints are not completely aligned as when Dev starts there could be change in designs or technical solution and time could vary in order to complete the work. So tracking progress of overall project and committing to completion date has been a challenge.

I am wondering if changing the project management tool can help to monitor if project is on track or off track for Dev work.

I have 2 options and wanted to get feedback from the group if you have had similar problem and have any feedback:

1. To implement Smartsheet to JIRA integrator - I read through the thread on this topic

2. to purchase premium license for JIRA advance roadmap and manage the entire project from JIRA

[Jacob Vu]

Hi @Sunita Mathew

I currently use Advanced Roadmaps for project management and it works well. When managing projects, Advanced Roadmaps allows you to create Plans that are project specific and will pull all related tasks into one plan where you're able to see the progress of every single task. This can be done for cross-functional projects (if there's multiple Jira projects) as well.

This helps you create high level milestones and schedules, but also helps you group tasks by sprint, etc..

There is a learning curve to using Advanced Roadmaps and configuration work needs to be done but it's a powerful tool once you've set it up.

I haven't integrated Smartsheet with JIRA before, but having done similar integrations, it takes time and effort to get the integration to work and then to get the data flowing properly from both JIRA and Smartsheet. 

If your dev teams use JIRA exclusively and you'll be managing more projects with them, I'd suggest using Advanced Roadmaps over integrating with a different PM software.

Hope that helps.

Jacob @ NorthTEK Consulting

[Sunita Mathew]

Thanks @Jacob Vu this is very helpful !

[Jacob Vu]

Hi @Sunita Mathew

No worries. Do keep in mind that if you were to move forward with Advanced Roadmaps, it would take some work to get everything set up. One downside of using Advanced Roadmaps is that although you can pull data from Jira Software, you'll need to configure and set up your Roadmaps if you haven't set up your JIRA projects to work with Roadmaps.

If you're ever in need of help with this, feel free to reach out to us at NorthTEK Consulting as we do this type of work with organizations.

Jacob @ NorthTEK Consulting