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In project management, effective planning, collaboration, and progress tracking are crucial for successful delivery. Currently, 68% of project professionals actively use a project schedule to maintain delivery stability.
So, what are the best project planning tools for small businesses? Among the many tools available today, Jira stands out as a popular project management service for team collaboration and tracking. Its versatility, supported by a vast global community, and its user-friendly interface make it a top choice for Scrum teams and those using Jira work management. The platform helps them streamline projects and reach their goals. It supports both basic and advanced planning, including the essential timeline feature.
In this guide, we will delve into the concept of Jira project timelines and their features.
Understanding Project Timelines
Effective project planning lays the foundation for project success.
With Jira, project planning becomes streamlined and more accessible. Teams can break down complex projects into smaller tasks, set priorities, and allocate resources judiciously. By defining clear objectives and deliverables, project planning in Jira becomes more efficient and goal-oriented.
Additionally, its collaboration features facilitate seamless communication among team members, enhancing the overall planning process. The timeline feature in Jira helps teams understand how long tasks take to complete, aiding in better coordination and delivery.
What are Jira Project Timelines?
Need a better way to organize project tasks? Jira timeline serves as a graphical depiction of project tasks, milestones, and timeframes. It enables PMs to allocate resources effectively and establish practical deadlines for activities, enhancing the project's timeline visibility and management through Jira Plans and custom timeline plugins. This timeline acts as a point of reference for the entire team, ensuring that everyone remains informed about the project’s advancement and upcoming deadlines. Using Jira for project timelines allows you to address risks, recognize possible obstacles, and maintain a transparent and detailed view of the project’s path.
Here’s a basic timeline view, where you can view schedules for a week, month, or quarter, see issue durations, and apply various filters.
Benefits of Jira Project Timelines
Jira project timelines offer numerous benefits to teams and organizations, making them an essential tool for project planning and management. By utilizing Jira project timelines, teams can:
- Improve Project Planning and Management: Visualizing tasks, milestones, and deadlines in a single view helps teams create a clear roadmap, ensuring that all project elements are accounted for and managed effectively.
- Enhance Collaboration and Communication: With a centralized timeline, team members, stakeholders, and clients can stay informed and aligned, fostering better communication and collaboration.
- Increase Productivity and Efficiency: Streamlining project workflows and reducing manual errors through automated processes and clear task assignments boosts overall productivity.
- Better Manage Resources: Effective resource management ensures that tasks are allocated optimally, preventing overloading or underutilization of team members.
- Track Progress and Identify Roadblocks: Regularly monitoring the timeline allows teams to track progress, spot potential issues early, and make proactive decisions to keep the project on track.
- Map and Visualize Dependencies: Defining how tasks link together helps teams understand the specific order of work and avoid potential delays.
- Provide Real-Time Project Updates: The timeline reflects all changes instantly; because of that you can see the current project status at any time without the need for manual reporting.
By leveraging these benefits, teams can achieve their project goals more efficiently and effectively.
Improving Project Planning and Management
Jira project timelines provide a detailed view of the project’s timeline and specific task details, allowing teams to plan and manage projects more effectively. By breaking down complex projects into smaller tasks and milestones, teams can:
- Create a Clear Project Roadmap: Outline key objectives, deliverables, and deadlines, providing a structured path for the project.
- Assign Tasks and Responsibilities: Ensure that every team member knows their roles and expectations, promoting accountability and clarity.
- Establish Realistic Timelines and Deadlines: Consider dependencies and potential roadblocks to set achievable deadlines that keep the project on track.
- Monitor Progress and Adjust Plans: Regularly review the project’s progress and make necessary adjustments to the plan, ensuring that the project meets its objectives and stays on schedule.
- Leverage automation: Set rules to automatically trigger notifications for overdue tasks or update fields when a dependent task is finished.
Altogether, these practices answer a common question among teams: How can I improve resource planning in Jira? By utilizing Jira’s detailed view and planning features, teams can manage complex projects with greater precision and confidence, ultimately leading to successful project outcomes.
Key Features of Timelines
User-Friendly Project Planning
Jira boasts an intuitive interface, making it effortless to create and visualize project plans. The drag-and-drop functionality allows easy adjustments to schedules while mapping dependencies ensures a seamless flow of the project.
Tailored Workflows for Team Managed Projects
Jira's flexibility allows teams to customize workflows according to their unique needs. By defining custom workflows, repetitive tasks can be automated, processes streamlined, and overall project efficiency improved. Both team-managed and company-managed projects are supported in this view.
Real-Time Collaboration
Collaboration is key to successful project management, and Jira facilitates it with real-time collaboration features. Teams can work together seamlessly, share updates, get feedback and resolve issues promptly. This fosters transparency and ensures all members are held accountable for their tasks.
Effective Issue Tracking
Jira's advanced issue-tracking system empowers teams to log, prioritize, and resolve project-related issues effectively. This ensures no tasks fall through the cracks and helps keep the entire project on its scheduled track.
Visualizing Project Roadmaps with Timeline View
The roadmap visualization feature in Jira Project Timelines provides stakeholders with a clear, high-level overview of project progress and upcoming milestones.
Jira Software users can gain a complete timeline view and roadmaps for company-managed and team-managed projects with the help of the Advanced Roadmaps that are only available for those who have Jira Software Premium and Enterprise.
Customizing a Jira Timeline
For those who want to improve project timeline Jira management, there are options to adjust timeline display settings and tailor the view according to their specific preferences. Also you can create custom timeline views, focusing on specific projects, teams, or team members.
Atlassian Marketplace offers plenty of third-party add-ons that extend Jira functionality with powerful features. You can try tools related to timelines and resource management like ActivityTimeline, that align with your requirements.
How to Create a Jira Timeline with ActivityTimeline?
Many teams ask, How can I track project progress more effectively? The answer often lies in moving beyond static task lists and adopting a visual planning tool like ActivityTimeline.
ActivityTimeline is a resource and cross-project planning tool that helps to track projects, their tasks, and resources with the help of individual and team timelines. The resource Planning Dashboard contains individual & team timelines with team/individual issues and projects with tasks. Users can assign tasks with a simple drag-n-drop feature directly on the timelines or create new Jira issues. The app is fully synchronized.
On the right, there is the Timeline Panel that organizes both current and future tasks within a single view. It features a calendar layout where rows represent individual schedules and columns correspond to specific days or weeks. This structure makes it easy to track work duration and manage deadlines across different timeframes.
On the Left, there is the Issue Panel with a list of all the current projects:
Best Practices for Creating Project Timelines
Start with a Detailed Scope
Before creating a timeline, ensure you have a detailed project scope that outlines its objectives, deliverables, and requirements. A clear understanding of the scope will help you define the project's timeline's structure accurately. For this to work effectively in ActivityTimeline, you should first perform the Initial Setup by mapping your Jira custom fields for Start and End date in the Configuration menu.
You can plan work not only for individual users but also plan long-term tasks and objectives for the entire team.
You can also effortlessly estimate tasks in ActivityTimeline (Click on any issue → Estimate → Choose Daily Estimate → Define hours → Click ‘Submit’):
Define Clear Milestones and Deliverables
Break down the project into phases and identify critical milestones end dates and deliverables for each phase. Clear milestones act as progress markers and help teams stay on track.
ActivityTimeline offers a special Milestones Panel to track important events, release dates, and deadlines. To access this, simply click the flag icon on the timeline toolbar; you can also configure this panel to visualize Jira Sprints as specific timeline events to align with your agile cycles. The milestone panel also gives the possibility to visualize sprints of the selected SCRUM boards.
Monitor Workload Distribution
Keep a balance in workload distribution among team members. Avoid overloading certain individuals while others have minimal responsibilities.
ActivityTimeline's user and team timelines also contain Unique Workload Indicators showing the current workload: if the indicator is green the workload is ok, if red - the user is overloaded, if yellow - underloaded.
Loto-Québec utilized ActivityTimeline to achieve full transparency over team availability and workload balance. This visibility allowed team leaders to demonstrate work overload clearly and justify hiring new employees when necessary. By monitoring these indicators, the organization ensured the right personnel were assigned to specific tasks without being overburdened. This data-driven approach helped the company reprioritize initiatives and maintain project timelines effectively.
Monitor Progress Regularly
Keep a close eye on the project's progress by regularly reviewing and updating the timeline. Address any deviations or potential delays promptly to mitigate risks. One of the most efficient ways to adjust plans is through drag-and-drop scheduling.
The app provides Filters, so it's easy to track separate projects. Just choose the needed one, as well as other data that you want to see, and apply them to timelines.
The other great option to monitor time spent on projects and their progress is Timesheets. The app has a dedicated timesheet module with Timeline Team Timesheets, where you can generate timesheets and understand how much time employees spent:
Try various timesheet templates, and sort and filter your project timesheets by the user to understand who spent time on which project.
Or sort by issues, to see how much time took each task within a given period:
You can even sort timesheets by epics:
If you need to get more detailed insights, try Detailed Team Timesheets to dive deeper. By the way, ActivityTimeline supports billable and non-billable hours, as well as other worklog types, so you can see them in this timesheet report:
Reports are also very important during the monitoring process. The app offers various reports of your choice:
For example, a Project Resources Forecast will show you a summary of how resources are scheduled per project for a given period:
Unlike the basic Jira export which may lose visual elements, all reports and timesheets in this app can be exported as an Excel file while retaining their detailed structure.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Jira timeline is a great option for optimizing your project management process, fostering collaboration, and achieving successful outcomes. With advanced timeline planning, efficient planning, focus on well-defined goals, and effective progress tracking, organizations can achieve their objectives effectively.
Embrace the customization possibilities of Jira timeline add-ons that help to find the best way to display project plan timelines and experiment with various features to discover the perfect fit for your organization. As you become more proficient, you'll unlock the platform's full potential and experience smoother, more streamlined work management.
