Project Monitor - Story telling

ITDream Srl  is an Italian company specialized in consulting and software sales.

Seven years ago Bob Thomson, the head of the software office, decided to introduce JIRA to better manage business processes and project activities of his area. Since that time the company's performance improved dramatically.

For every new customer acquired in GetDream, it is created a JIRA project and each of this unpacked in multiple activities. Usually the team leaders are designated to estimate the activities and to assign them to the various team members.

With time, however, the projects are increased and are become more and more complicated: for Tom and Alison, respectively, Team Leader and Project Manager, it is increasingly difficult to keep the performance of their projects under control !!

They complain about two different but equally important critical issues.

Tom in particular is concerned above all operational aspect, it would have a targeted control on the status of activities in relation to the estimates made. In this way you could understand if the team is working on schedule and if its ability to estimate what he believes are reliable. the project that most worries me is called ProgettoV, which over time has become increasingly complex, and consequently it was found more and more difficult to handle for Tom. In fact JIRA is perfect to manage and track individual tasks, but when the issues are too many how can you have an overview on the entire project? How can we understand if we are in line with what we had estimated? Tom would like to answer these questions.

Alison instead has a look of the highest level: His fear is to lose sight of the deadline fixed by its customers and therefore does not comply with the commercial deadlines. Specifically, the MarketThink project is one of the most successful projects to the business and therefore it is very important to check that everything goes better and ensure that the customer is always satisfied.

To deal with these unpleasant problems, Tom and Alison set a meeting with Bob and decide to visit the Atlassian Marketplace looking for some add-on for Jira I can do for them.
Et voila! Their focus falls on a plugin called Project Monitor.

Immediately Tom and Alison understand that this plugin will allow them to monitor the status of projects with just a glance and it will be a valuable aid for their needs of Project Management. They are also excited that Project Monitor will allow them to get two complementary gadgets (Project Monitor-Delivery Tracking and Project Monitor- Effort Tracking), perfect to keep tabs on the key aspects, easy to use and always available on their Dashboards. So why not try Project Monitor?

They decide to download a trial version and check that they actually are done for them.

The two access their Dashboard, and, clicking the appropriate button, add the two gadgets!

Tom believes to be more interested in the Project Monitor- Effort Tracking and so configures it ad hoc to his needs; select the "ProgettoV" project and he lets start the gadget.

Red dot !!! Alarm for Tom!

What Tom can see, thanks to the two bars, is that the estimated investment and representations of what actually employed are not online: 3 weeks of potential delay.

In his case, the top bar (the Estimated bar) is 23 weeks long. This means that the sum of Original Estimate of all issues estimated into the project is 23 weeks. The part of bar in light gray, shows the value of logged hours and instead the part in dark gray, the number of remaining weeks to complete the project.

The bottom bar, the Actual bar, refers instead to the real data, and not estimated. This means, for example, that until that moment are been logged 9w on issues which it should have been spending 8w. This could mean that Tom's resources are working at low speed, for example, or that there was a not expected problem, or that Tom is been unlucky with the estimates.

Based on what the team has worked so far, it is made a prediction about how much longer is expected to last the project, in this case still other 17w instead of the 15 planned! Thanks to the red dot is immediately clear to Tom that it is late and how much is delta between estimated and real.
Tom knows that something is going wrong and thanks to Project Monitor-Effort Tracking now is aware of: must do something to change things!

Instead, Alison, by handling directly with the customer, has to guarantee the delivery of the project in commercially predetermined times and then verify that operationally is the same. She can't afford to deliver late. The MarketThink project in particular is related to a very important customer for the company and therefore she can't disappoint him. For this reason she is sure that the gadget Project Monitor- Delivery Tracking is perfect for her. So she began to configure it.
Alison is interested in a project and then select this option, but it could be possible to select a precise Sprint (if she worked according to the Agile methodology and then wanted to monitor the progress into the Sprint) or a filter that returns only a specific pool of activities that affect her. If the project had versions Alison may also select the single version. But  in this case Alison select the entire project.

At this point, after selecting the MarketThink project, defines the commercial start/end dates (6/10 / 2016- 28/02/2017) within which the project must be completed.
 
And here's what the gadget returns as a result of the parameters defined by Alison. What does it mean?

The Estimated bar defines the percentage of project's completion to today in relation to the estimates and commercially defined dates .
The Actual bar instead gives you a real progress indication of the project in percentage terms; this allows you to make a comparison between the current state of progress and planned work. Then ypu could be able to do reasoning on how you are progressing then how you should do.

Moreover, the gadget make a prediction of when the project will be concluded on the basis of the team's velocity. This prediction does not give an indication only in terms of days, but also provides a date.

In this case, if all goes as it has been until today, Alison knows most likely to be in advance and that she'll probably finish the project on 2/16/2017, and so she will respect the commercial terms. The green rectangle is such precisely because Alison is ahead and so can be quiet. It also indicates in terms of days how many days she is in advance.

Tom and Alison are very pleased with the Project Monitor. Finally they manage to succinctly have the information on the progress of their projects, information that is difficult to find in JIRA.

Even Bob, the head of the software office,  believes that Project Monitor could be a great help for those who have a role as him. He would fit inside its dashboard many Project Monitor as there are projects of his business area. In this way he will have all informations on the overall performance of the projects, at a glance.

What distinguishes Project Monitor is clarity, simplicity and immediacy of the information it provides at a glance, thanks to a single icon.

Why don't you try it too? You can have a trial license here.