Making the Move from Microsoft Project & Excel to Jira for Project Management

At GLiNTECH, we often come across organisations that are caught between using traditional, outdated project management tools like MS Project (or even Excel!) and transitioning to a modern Agile tool like Jira. While MS Project has its strengths, it often falls short in areas where Atlassian’s Jira shines: seamless collaboration, real-time updates, and an intuitive interface. We find that a lot of the hesitation around switching to Jira comes from not fully understanding its powerful project management capabilities.

We’ve guided all sorts of organisations through this transformation, from financial institutions to global media companies and everything in between. Many clients face similar challenges with project management and reporting. They often use Microsoft products to track projects at a high level, while the actual work is tracked and delivered in Jira. This disconnect between project planning and execution usually results in a lot of manual effort and often outdated project status updates.

By consolidating project tracking with Jira, you can enjoy a more dynamic, self-service approach to project management that ensures everything is always up-to-date. At GLiNTECH, we're here to help make that transition smooth and successful!

Results that speak for themselves

By transitioning to project management in Jira, our clients experience significant improvements in several key areas:

• Seamless Collaboration: All Atlassian products prioritise easy collaboration. Features such as comments, @ mentions, and easy document sharing significantly enhance team communication and coordination.
• Enhanced Visibility: Tracking your largest projects in Jira using a customisable hierarchy bridges the gap between high-level planning and team-level delivery. This enables comprehensive project planning and visualisation within a single source of truth: Jira.
• Real-Time Reporting: Adopting a "little and often" approach to updating Jira, combined with integrated dashboards and reports, our clients can adopt more asynchronous ways of reporting and minimise those pesky status update meetings.
• Better Decision Making: Real-time visualisations of work progress and cross-team dependencies empowers teams to plan more effectively, deliver more predictably and address blockers proactively.
• Scenario Planning: Our clients love the flexibility of scenario planning. This allows you to create and analyse multiple potential future states for projects that are linked to their source of truth without disrupting your teams.

Helping to improve your experience

The benefits of moving project management into your single source of truth outlined above are just some of the ways Jira has helped our clients. Additionally, Jira offers an array of robust features to further complement your project planning and work management capabilities:

• Streamlined Automations: The no code workflow and automation modules make it easier than ever to reduce tedious tasks and help keep work up to date. We can customise your Jira to save you time with things like real-time notifications, dynamic status updates, and automated issue creation.
• Easy Customisation: Our consultants can work with your organisation’s key stakeholders to tailor the tool to your unique needs. We’ll design a Jira delivery framework to support your ways of working and implement various features to get the most out of your Atlassian tools from project templates to simplify reporting to customised workflows to incorporate things like stage gates, approvals and data validations.
• Balanced Flexibility: While a standardised framework is key to getting meaningful insights, our team is experienced in balancing standardisation and flexibility. We steer away from things like mandatory fields (unless absolutely necessary) opting instead for an accountability-driven approach. We’ll guide you in setting minimum standards and offer insights on maintaining data integrity without stifling creativity.
• Adaptable Reporting: Our team specialises in crafting tailored reporting solutions via Jira Dashboards, Confluence Reporting Hubs and various other preferred reporting tools. We’ll tailor your framework to align with your desired reporting outcomes, empowering you to access critical insights effortlessly, whenever you need them.
• Seamless Integrations: Jira seamlessly integrates with a wide range of tools, enhancing its versatility and potency as a project management platform. Integration with development tools like Bitbucket and GitHub ensures smooth tracking of code changes and CI/CD pipelines. Collaboration is enhanced through seamless connections with tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Confluence. Additionally, Atlassian Cloud products support Smart Links for enriched hyperlinking, while the Atlassian Marketplace boasts thousands of apps to maximise the power of your Atlassian products.

Take the next steps

Reach out for a chat with our team to better understand how you can consolidate your project management tools with the help of Jira. We recommend checking out our tried and tested Advanced Planning Jumpstart Package to get up and running quickly while setting the foundations to expertly scale when you’re ready. Contact us today on 1300 431 733 or email info@glintech.com for more info.

Blog authored by Alevia Thomson, Agile Delivery Manager, GLiNTECH