Maximizing project management as an activity involves optimizing processes, tools, and ways of communication to achieve better outcomes across a project's life and making it more efficient, productive, and aligned with the project's goals. This blog post will explore which aspect you should rely on to improve project management and how software can be your best ally.
Improving project management requires a thoughtful approach to the previously mentioned critical areas, and your software tooling can help. Before translating this information to the tool, it's important to have standards on how to collaborate and, that way, positively evolve with the project management solution of your choice.
By talking about project management, we're not referring exclusively to the PMO profession and the formality it requires. In this blog post, we're referring to a holistic approach to project management, which involves every person involved and overseeing tasks to achieve specific goals, and setting objectives, coordinating team efforts, tracking progress, and adjusting plans to ensure successful completion might be among those activities.
Essentially, the management of a project it's about ensuring everything gets done on time and within budget while keeping everyone aligned and motivated.
Once that's established, let's focus on the project management tool we will use. The first step to selecting it will be to ensure that the software solution aligns with the project's goals, requirements, and timeline.
First, let's take care of the project itself. That starts by clearly defining the project's scope and success criteria, assessing its technical feasibility, ensuring it integrates with existing systems and can handle scaling, creating a detailed project plan outlining the development stages, timelines, and resource requirements, and ensuring the software meets stakeholders' needs, expectations, and knowledge. We all know that.
Focusing on these aspects from the beginning can help project managers ensure that the software solution is a valuable asset to the project and contributes to its overall success.
Here’s when Jira comes into play. Due to its exceptional customization and flexibility, this software tool is regarded as one of the preferred ones for managing projects, particularly for software developers and agile environments.
This tool makes various project management styles adaptable. Whether managing simple tasks or large-scale initiatives, Jira’s ability to scale ensures that it can meet the needs of both small teams and large enterprises. And here’s where its usability comes in handy. The platform's structure of epics, stories, and tasks makes it easy to break down complex projects into manageable parts, fostering better task management. That's very valuable, but What happens when the opposite is needed? When a high-level view of the project portfolio is necessary? We'll leave that question there and continue in the meantime.😉
Jira’s reporting tools help users track project performance and key metrics through dashboards. It integrates with other Atlassian tools like Confluence, Bitbucket, Jira Service Management, and third-party apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Jira also enables collaboration and transparency, keeping teams informed and making it an ideal choice.
Enabling a project progress tracking system allows you to monitor task completion rates and check the project's overall health, providing a clear picture of the project's tasks status. While other tools may lack this aspect, Jira allows you to manage your projects effectively. Keep reading to learn more!
Besides, the time management features that allow you to set deadlines, assign tasks to team members, and send automatic reminders minimize the risk of missing crucial deadlines.
Finally, the possibilities of stakeholder collaboration are crucial, given the need to centralize communication on a single platform. This would keep all discussions, files, and decisions in one place, making it easier for teams to stay aligned.
The most obvious benefits would be those mentioned above, such as:
A project management tool like Jira provides structure, clarity, and real-time visibility into every aspect of a project. By using key features like calendars, timelines, and resource allocation effectively, project managers can ensure that tasks are well-organized, deadlines are met, and resources are used efficiently.
The Atlassian Marketplace offers a vast ecosystem of apps (almost six thousand options and counting) that enhances and customizes the functionality of core Atlassian products like Jira. These apps extend the capabilities of these tools, helping teams customize workflows, automate processes, manage projects more efficiently, and improve collaboration. As in our case, enhancing the performance of our projects, supported with the right apps:
Apps such as Tempo Timesheets for time tracking and resource planning, eazyBI for advanced reporting and business intelligence, ScriptRunner, and Automation for automatizations are very useful tools that promise to help you with some aspects of project management.
Within these options, there is Projectrak for Jira, which focuses particularly on enhancing project portfolio management. It's ideal for companies that need to monitor multiple projects simultaneously at a large scale.
This Jira app makes project management more efficient by offering custom views for different stakeholders, powerful search capabilities, Jira project reporting, the centralization and planning of project information, and many other features.
More specifically, Projectrak allows tracking the project's evolution, providing project-level capabilities that Jira lacks natively. It consolidates cluster project data across their portfolio, enabling users to track, manage, and organize their projects more effectively.
One of the most attractive opportunities Projectrak offers is the possibility of creating project fields, which are some sort of custom fields for projects. These fields allow teams to define important project attributes such as status, deadlines, budget, priority, and more.
Projectrak allows teams to visualize and manage their entire project portfolio within Jira. It is helpful for project managers and executives who need a high-level view of multiple projects at once. The Project Navigator feature offers various views (List, Board, and Timeline), enabling users to quickly assess project progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions.
The possibility of Jira project reporting for multiple projects in Jira dashboards makes the difference when creating detailed reports on different aspects of project progress. As you can see:
We cannot leave aside the possibilities of integration with other Jira apps and the possibilities of automatization it enables. It integrates with eazyBI for advanced reporting or Automation for Jira to set up custom rules and automatization to streamline project management tasks.
As we can see, it's important to establish the project guidelines first and then choose the right tool for that, depending on your needs. Jira and Projectrak are good options for those who need a high-level view of a project portfolio. Turning Jira into a more comprehensive project portfolio management tool is neccesary for that, and Projectrak is the medium.
Centralizing key project data and enabling better reporting is essential when managing one or multiple projects,, and Projectrak gives you the control, flexibility, and insights you need to keep everything on track.
Using a project management tool effectively means not just setting and leaving tasks. Regularly review task progress, timelines, and resource allocation, adjusting as needed. This dynamic approach ensures that your task planning remains agile, flexible, and responsive to any changes in the project, making you feel more in control.
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