The discipline of project management is decades old, and the field has come a long way from the early days of rudimentary PERT charts and critical path methods. However, despite so many advancements and “lessons learned,” in the big picture project failure generally remains the norm rather than the exception.
Software engineers have wisely realized that they need specialized solutions to manage issues, iterations, bugs, and carry out other mission-critical R&D activities. And around the world, a tool that many engineers include on their “must-have” list is JIRA.
JIRA’s class-leading capacity to pull back the curtains and enable engineers to see what’s really going on — instead of relying on guestimates and gut feels — is essential related to planning, tracking, reporting and releasing.
However, as vital as this is, it’s not the full story — because there is another level of visibility that must be present in the enterprise environment: one that links engineers working in JIRA, to project management teams working outside of JIRA.
The Visibility Gap
In many enterprises, project management teams working outside of JIRA do not have real-time visibility into what engineers using JIRA are doing on a day-to-day basis. As a result, PMO staff, IT project managers and executives often lack the visibility they need. Data must be gathered by manually tracking all R&D progress and changes. Aside from being tedious and time consuming, this activity can be error-prone, and it puts engineering teams on a collision course with their non-engineering colleagues since it’s usually not a question of whether projects will go sideways, but when and how bad. That’s where Planview AdaptiveWork for JIRA enters the picture and makes an immediate difference.
About Planview AdaptiveWork for JIRA
Clarizen’s JIRA integration is a robust, flexible and scalable SaaS service called manually, via custom actions or through an advanced scheduling pooling mechanism. It allows project managers and other stakeholders to plan projects, portfolios, resources, budgets and more, while seamlessly integrating research and development activities from JIRA to Planview AdaptiveWork and vice versa.
Essentially, the bi-directional nature of the integration closes the loop and eliminates the visibility gap: engineers focus on day-to-day tasks and report their progress in JIRA, while project management teams get a clear view of project progress in Planview AdaptiveWork. Enterprises can control how they want the two systems to integrate, installation is minimal with zero drain on hardware or server resources and ongoing software upgrades are automatic, seamless and free.
The Bottom Line
For many good reasons, engineers like (and some even love) JIRA. However, working on issues, bugs and other R&D tasks cannot be done in a silo, since broader project management teams need to manage budgets, schedules, resources, stakeholder expectations and portfolios.
In the past, the gap between people working in JIRA and people working outside was a massive pitfall where many “good projects went bad.” But now with Planview AdaptiveWork for JIRA, it’s the critical integration that allows enterprises to fully implement agile methodologies, optimize their JIRA investment and reap the bottom-line rewards of working faster and smarter.
