All Project Managers must have a deep understanding of the entire business to successfully orchestrate multiple projects, tasks, and teams simultaneously. This includes how departments interplay with one another, and how outcomes are tied to time and budget. Having the tools and systems in place, like Jira Software, to properly monitor projects is essential to the success of any project manager.
Jira users can manage multiple projects simultaneously, both simple and complex. Epic Sum Up (ESU) power-up is a new and powerful Data Visualisation tool that works with Jira to give you a quick visual overview and status of each Project Issue.
A Project Issue is essentially a solution that allows you to group Jira Issues or tickets within a large project into smaller, more manageable segments or pieces. Effective segmentation of Projects into Stories or Task bundles will help you gain control of all your Projects and provide a better gateway to automating some recurring tasks.
Learn more about how Epic Sum Up can help Project Managers identify problems while a project is in progress as well as after the project has been completed. We all know that problems can arise at any point in the life of a project, and ESU will be your secret weapon. In this article, we’ll be digging into the features and numerous benefits of using Epic Sum Up in conjunction with Jira.
What is Data Visualisation?
Data visualisation allows project data such as timelines, budget, and tasks to be broken down into interactive visual representations including progress bars, charts, graphs, etc. It offers a quick and customised summary of project data that can also show patterns over any time, helping to establish a roadmap of sorts for future planning.
Data Visualisation influences the decision-making process of Project Managers by breaking down project-specific information into manageable pieces of information that are easy to interpret. The visualisation of data can stop projects from being at risk.
The Role of a Project Manager in Predicting a Problem
Proactively collecting information on upcoming and current projects in addition to thoughtful planning of resources helps reduce the need to manage projects reactively.
When a project manager can predict a potential problem from available data, the chaos from triaging unexpected problems can be reduced dramatically. This results in noticeable benefits, including lowering overtime or outside rush fees, sensible hiring, delivering work on time, reducing errors, and boosting staff morale with a more predictable, less stressful work environment.
Why Is It Importnat to Keep Track of Issues in Jira?
The ongoing challenge of the Project Manager is to successfully manage multiple projects on Jira, put out fires where necessary, and guide team members. Without keeping track of Issues on Jira, projects can easily spin out of control.
Prioritisation and crisis prevention skills are part of what makes a Project Manager great at their job. Power-ups like Epic Sum Up can help Project Managers anticipate overlaps in a Project Issue, see at-a-glance where things are bottle-necking, and unpack subtasks without going 40 clicks deep. Epic Sum Up makes it easy to have a birds-eye view of Project Issues, without needing to delve into the specifics.
Tracking Project Progress in Jira Before Epic Sum Up
One of the key challenges which Project Managers face is the ability to manage and navigate all the Project Issues and Epics they oversee at the same time in Jira. Before the development of ESU data visualisations, a major disadvantage of Jira was that you didn’t have any way of seeing a summary of different metrics or any metric in one view for each of your Epics. Project managers would have to dig deep into each individual Epic manually to see the progress and status of issues, tasks, and stories.
Project Managers would spend an excessive amount of time and budget digging through changelogs and comments, looking for evidence of progress and any red flags signalling a problem that required attention. And if you didn’t check everything daily, you might miss a red flag and put the project in jeopardy. This inefficient method of monitoring projects is vastly improved with the implementation of data visualisations like Epic Sum Up for a more convenient and visual method of quickly summarising project data.
Epic Sum Up - A Better Way of Tracking Project Progress on Jira with
If you want to get the most out of Jira, it’s wise to take note of Data Visualisation power-ups like Epic Sum Up. With Epic Sum Up a summary panel with customisable progress bars is added to every Project Issue in Jira. It’s a live real-time summary of what is going on inside your Project Issue. The far-reaching flexibility of ESU visualisations can also be added to all issue types including (but not limited to) stories, tasks, and Epics in Jira.
Project Managers have greater control of the hierarchy and organisation of every Project Issue with Epic Sum Up because they can customise the metrics. Project data is transformed into a highly visual instant dashboard using progress bars, colour coding, and principles of Agile project management.
While configuration is essentially automatic, customisation is virtually limitless. Users can choose which metrics or fields to visualise, where, when, and why. These include budget, time, story points, team tasks, and overall progress – just to name a few. One of the primary benefits is that users can define a budget which is not possible in Jira otherwise.
When a Project Manager can create a customised dashboard that highlights their priorities, in an easy-to-read layout, they have more control of multiple Project Issues at once. Customised progress bars provide detailed project summaries which help Project Managers make informed decisions for the direction of projects during and after completion.
Epic Sum Up is a Project Manager's Dream Come True
Epic Sum Up is a dream come true for Project Managers because it was designed with Project Management frustrations in mind. Jira alone is a powerful tool, but with the integration of Epic Sum Up you can easily visualise data within Jira to see the status of multiple projects at the same time. Its flexibility and customisation features make it easy for Project Managers to easily integrate this valuable power-up into their current Jira configuration.
Get started today and try Epic Sum Up from the Atlassian Marketplace. This useful application will make it significantly easier to manage all your Project Issues in Jira.
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