The project information stored in Jira is valuable for your business intelligence; In this post, we will show you through six hands-on examples of reports for different projects, how to boost your Jira reports for multiple projects, your business and how to start making data-driven decisions based on visual information.
What you will learn with this blog post?
The main responsability of a Project Manager is making decisions based on reliable data by keeping a detailed tracking of projects, that's why relying on the memory is the single most critical mistake they can make. Of course, they might cope with 8 projects, products and/or teams, but imagine when there are from 35 to 130 different initiatives... that sounds like trouble.
Based on the fact there’s a limit for human memory given the Working Memory span relies on only 15 seconds to process relevant information (without rehearsals) in order to make it to the Long-Term Memory. Imagine how much info needs to be processed.
Counting with a strong visual component when overseeing dozens of projects is crucial to not to quickly lose track of the differences between them and reinforce our memory span. After all, we are just humans.
In order to avoid the low-value research, the last-minute digging for data that should be available at first sight, and similar time-consuming activities, relying on some kind of reporting simple enough to be used as a map would be at least, the essential.
Project report overviews are a solution to map the performance of multiple projects; they are simple reports in a table format displaying information about different projects, each row of this table belongs to each project, and one column for each piece of project information, which can include team members, KPIs, assets, deadlines, or any other type of key data.
Project overviews for projects should change with context, and leaders must define what data points should be captured, always aiming at finding the balance between complete and simple information.
Check for another option: Display project specific-information about multiple projects in a Jira dashboard.
VPs of Engineering, Product Managers and Program Managers whose teams work with Jira tend to create project summaries on Confluence pages despite the difficulty suppose structuring the information there in order to make it complete yet digestible.
That's why we recommend creating these project summaries on Jira, directly where the information is stored and everything happens, despite it also has several blockers:
An important alternative is to create project summaries in Jira, using Projectrak (formerly Profields), which immediately allows to:
For a better explanation, in the following we have compiled six examples of project report overviews for multiple projects that can be used in different circumstances and organizational settings in order to track an adequate project reporting and make data-driven decisions: from IT, innovation, financial departments, to customer-facing projects, product development, and even C-level executives.
On the other side, if you are looking other project reporting options in Jira, here you can read more about in this Apwide article, options to be displayed in Jira dashboards.
Learn how to create a subscription to a query for projects in Projectrak >>
For each of the following examples, we’ll indicate what types of project custom fields have been used. Whenever script fields are used, we’ll link to Projectrak's Documentation Center so you can recreate the field in your instance without coding a single line.
All project data in Projectrak (formerly Profields) can be easily accessed from the link provided at the top of the subscription email
When to use it: Tracking within your projects how much your team has spent, it's critical in any project based on an initial budget, with an internal or external customer. The beauty of this report for budget tracking is how simple it is! You can also create a fourth column with the remaining budget using a simple calculation.
Difficulty: Low.
When to use it: Companies with formal innovation programs may run them in Jira. In this case, it’s useful to have a simple oversight of the amount of innovation projects for each program in the portfolio, together with the current phase they are in (we borrowed the status from the Stage Gate model), and how much investment has been made until now. The total of open stories is used here as a proxy of how large the effort in the project currently is.
Difficulty: Medium.
When to use it: Companies with large IT departments relying on ITIL or any other ITSM framework, identify different processes for the services they provide to the entire company in their IT Service catalog. Having the catalog in Jira with the amount of ongoing work, and a team responsible for supporting it can be very useful to keep things tight.
Difficulty: High
How to build it:
When to use it: In a company that manage several products, or any other company with a microservices architecture, having an overview of every product team can be very beneficial for general oversight and for key decisions regarding resourcing and velocity.
Another solution to having control over each version of your products (in the case you are using each project as a product) is taking advantage of the Release View.
Difficulty: Low
How to build it:
When to use it: Consultancy companies who offer time from their experts to be consumed on demand by their customers can automate most of the administration with Projectrak, as we do in DEISER. That includes having a complete overview of all the existing support pools.
Difficulty: Medium
How to build it:
When to use it: This is the most generic example, It will usually be useful in any situation where the organization spans a large number of activities with different goals and priorities. In other words: if you have more than 100 Jira projects aligned with different types of activities, you can leverage a summary of this type to inventory what’s going on across the board.
Difficulty: Low.
How to build it:
As it can be seen, by applying these simple practices on project tracking across multiple projects using Jira and Projectrak will be easier to boost project management abilities and enhance the business intelligence of your company, in order to make more reliable decisions based on data provided directly from where the actual work happens: in Jira.
If you have more doubts about the implementation of these tricks, please don't hesitate on contacting us through our Customer Support Desk, or even better, if you are looking ways to automate the updates project data in Jira, in order to take faster data-driven decisions check the e-book we have prepared with seven use cases of Automation with Projectrak you can download by clicking the button below.
This blog post is the product of a collaboration between Jaime Capitel, and Leo Díaz, with the support of the Product and Marketing teams.
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