Jira is the go-to when tracking work items and spaces. When managing projects in Jira (stakeholders, metadata, health, etc.), most teams end up building fragile workarounds, moving away from Jira to monitor project progress in spreadsheets, micromanage, or buy enterprise-heavy portfolio tools when they only needed a project structure in Jira. In this blog, we’ll show you how to bring project-level structure into Jira to monitor progress clearly and reduce micromanaging.
Atlassian is going through a lot of changes lately, starting from the announcement of the Atlassian Data Center End of Life (EOL), the introduction of Collections, the renaming of many structures and features, and concerning this matter, the renaming of Jira Projects to Jira Spaces: a terminology change in Jira Cloud, where functionality remains the same.
Usually, micromanagement is a consequence of a lack of visibility of project progress, sometimes tight to personality traits, but it’s not just that. When stakeholders and executives can’t see the project health or which tasks have been marked as “done,” the power to make the next decision is limited, increasing daily meetings and updates, transforming the project progress into a witch hunt for task-level details related to projects.
One solid fix is to track project progress based on milestones, just because they shift the conversation from “what did you do today?” to “are we on track to hit the next outcome checkpoint?” Even better, depending on the way you implement them, those questions don’t have to be made.
One of the challenges of using milestones in Jira is that it doesn’t formally support them at the project level in a simple, native way, so teams usually rely on workarounds such as naming work items as “milestones,” tagging task-level custom fields, using Timeline, version releases, or external tools.
Giving more structure to projects in Jira means moving from grouping work items to giving each initiative a clear, shared project structure that anyone can understand in minutes.
In practice, that structure should include a defined purpose (why the project exists and what success looks like), clear ownership (who’s accountable and who needs to be kept in the loop), and a consistent way to communicate status (health, current phase, and what’s changing).
Having a project structure in place also means having real project controls, like target start and end dates accompanied by a set of important marks, defining decision points and tangible deliveries, making project progress measured by outcomes instead of single task completion and monitoring.
Finally, to make your portfolio-level management more robust, standardization should be common across projects, making it easier to compare and analyze based on the same fields and views, making future project optimization easier, as well as making updates should be fast, reliable, massive, and documented inside Jira so teams don’t lose context.
The whole point of advancing faster and reliably with your projects is to make Jira your project operations center, where you’re already managing them at the task level. So, how to do it?
Instead of guessing progress from within a sea of tickets, get a clean set of checkpoints organized in different views, allowing every stakeholder to understand without additional or recurrent status meetings. Imagine having project milestones organized across a timeline view for your projects, displaying information linked to work items, grouping them with standards such as Kickoff approved, Requirements documents signed, Release candidate ready, Go-live, or similar...
⬆️By clicking into Projectrak’s Milestones within the Timeline View,⬆️ it’s possible to review their metadata and related work items, which turns them into a day-to-day guide with fixed dates, instead of just a reporting artifact.
Milestones reduce micromanaging by replacing those constant checks with a tool documented view with a small set of outcome-based checkpoints that every stakeholder involved can rally around.
When a project has clearly defined milestones, the conversations progress naturally, move away from the stress of double-checking project data. That shift allows stakeholders, and especially project managers, to have the project visibility they need to keep project progress in check.
Instead of requesting daily status pings, with milestones in place, leaders can look at milestones and be sure:
This results in better accountability, clearer priorities for delivery teams, cleaner and faster reporting for project managers, more consistent governance for the Project Managers Office (PMO), and decision-ready status for executives, reducing the noise and friction that usually drives micromanagement.
Milestones are great for projects, as we can see. But what happens when our projects are scaling and we need to establish better project monitoring across the project portfolio in Jira?
A better project portfolio structure in Jira means you can understand and compare projects across Jira spaces without opening ten different tabs, digging through boards, or rebuilding context every time someone asks for an update.
In practice, a well-structured portfolio has a consistent project data standardization applied everywhere:
Finally, structure should be easy to maintain at scale. You need views that let you scan the portfolio fast, filter what matters, and update multiple projects without clicking into each one.
This is exactly where Projectrak for Jira becomes the end solution to bring project structure and monitor progress in Jira, offering that project-level layer across multiple work items and spaces with consistent portfolio views (like List, Board, and Timeline), making your portfolio comparable, reportable, and easy to manage without micromanaging teams.
Once a consistent way to describe projects is introduced in Jira, the next challenge is keeping that information accurate over time. This is where many portfolios quietly break down: statuses drift out of date, priorities change but never get reflected, and reporting becomes a monthly scramble to “fix the data” before leadership reviews.
A healthy portfolio needs maintenance that’s fast enough to happen continuously, not just on Fridays. Projectrak’s Advanced Edition supports that reality by making portfolio practical at scale by changing project values across the whole portfolio in a few minutes, and by counting with a dedicated support manager, this project layer stays reliable without turning into another admin job:
Updating project information shouldn’t feel like a quarterly cleanup, and manual updates across dozens of projects are exactly what push teams back into spreadsheet rituals. That’s why the Advanced Edition exists. Besides, having a dedicated customer support Manager, you get guidance to shape the project model, refine it as your organization matures, and implement improvements in a way that drives adoption rather than resistance.
For many organizations, especially in regulated industries or global enterprises, portfolio tooling needs to meet compliance expectations around where data lives. Here’s where data residency becomes part of internal approvals.
Having a clear data residency in place for Projectrak will help procurement and security teams move faster, because it reduces the number of exceptions for review, and for the PMO is critical because project-level data often includes stakeholders, timelines, and strategic information that organizations treat as sensitive.
Learn more about how Projectrak’s Data Residency for Jira works >>
Isn't it better to monitor projects instead of keep creating more and more Jira Spaces? As not every initiative has the same magnitude, or deserves its own Jira Space. Some work needs real visibility, and creating a full space creates more operational burn: administration, permissions, templates, boards, and long-term cleanup.
That’s how portfolios end up with a Spaces mess, where Jira becomes harder to govern as it grows. Creating and tracking lightweight initiatives in the project portfolio layer (Projectrak) without forcing them into full Jira Spaces is a great solution.
Projectrak Projects are designed for exactly this scenario: giving PMOs visibility over initiatives that still need ownership, status, dates, and milestones, while keeping Jira itself cleaner and easier to manage. And more importantly, it supports a clearer model where you can manage both usual work (in Jira Spaces) and broader initiatives (as Projectrak projects) within one consistent portfolio view.
As Jira continues evolving, the real challenge for many teams stays the same: turning day-to-day task tracking into a clear, trustworthy view of project progress that stakeholders can actually use.
When your portfolio has a consistent project structure, milestone-based checkpoints, and a single place to monitor status and health, the pressure for constant follow-ups drops naturally because the answers are already visible.
Projectrak for Jira closes that gap by helping teams to keep project data standardized, progress easy to interpret, and reporting grounded in outcomes, so project managers spend less time chasing updates and more time driving delivery.