What is Jira Timeline Planning?
Jira users can create visual representations of project timelines. It allows teams to plan and organize their project activities, tasks, sub-tasks, and milestones in a clear and intuitive manner.
With this feature, users can easily map out the sequence of tasks, set deadlines, and define dependencies between different activities. By visualizing the project timeline, team members can gain a comprehensive overview of the project's progress and identify potential bottlenecks or delays. This planning approach helps teams stay organized, improve coordination, and ensure that project deadlines are met.
What are the Types of Timelines?
Timelines are invaluable tools in project management, providing a visual representation of activities and schedules. Here is a quick overview of some of the most popular timelines for project management:
- The Gantt chart is one of the most widely used timelines in project management. It presents project activities as horizontal bars along a time axis, allowing project managers to visualize task dependencies, durations, and milestones. Gantt charts provide a clear overview of project progress, critical paths, and resource allocation, aiding in effective project planning and scheduling.
- Agile Iteration Timeline is suitable for teams following agile methodologies. This timeline allows teams to plan and track work within iterative cycles, often referred to as sprints. It visualizes the tasks, user stories, or backlog items planned for each sprint, helping teams monitor progress and adjust plans accordingly.
- Roadmap Timeline offers a strategic view of project plans and initiatives. It presents key milestones, epics, and major deliverables over an extended timeline, allowing stakeholders to visualize the project's direction and progress. The roadmap timeline aids in aligning project goals with organizational objectives and facilitates effective communication with stakeholders.
- Swimlane Timeline, also known as a process timeline, organizes project activities based on the responsible parties or functional departments. It visualizes the sequence of tasks across different departments or team members, helping to identify dependencies and potential bottlenecks
- Resource timelines refer to visual representations that display the allocation and availability of resources over a specific period. Resource timelines typically include information such as resource names, tasks or projects assigned to each resource, start, and end dates, and the duration of assignments. They may also indicate the workload or effort allocated to each resource during specific time intervals.
How to get a Jira Timeline Chart?
Jira offers a simple task timeline view with a few customizations. When the project is open just select a Timeline View option, which will display the project's issues in a visual chart.
You can customize the chart to fit your project's needs by adjusting the time scale and applying filters.
Jira doesn’t provide in-built comprehensive resource timelines, but it offers a wide variety of add-ons to supplement its capabilities.
How to Get an Advanced Jira Timeline View?
Those users who want to receive a comprehensive timeline overview of all projects, tasks, teams, and user activity in a single place can try helpful Jira add-ons like ActivityTimeline. The app is presented in the Atlassian Marketplace and is compatible with Jira Software and Jira Work Management.
ActivityTimeline for Jira is a resource planning & tracking tool, that helps users to create high-level short, and long-term plans, track workload and monitor activity in real-time, allocate resources wisely without effort. The key principle of the tool is that it's very customizable and allows you to see who is doing what and when it will be done.
Let's dive deeper into details and single out the most powerful features for successful timeline planning.
Examples of Jira Timeline Implementations with ActivityTimeline
ActvitityTimeline offers various timeline views, which facilitate Jira resource planning & tracking. Among them:
Resource Planning Timelines
Resource planning timelines focus on the allocation and utilization of resources throughout a project. These timelines help project managers visualize resource availability, identify resource gaps or conflicts, and allocate resources effectively.
You can find planning timelines in ActivityTimeline, presented on a comprehensive Planning Dashboard. It contains User/Team Timelines and a list of Jira projects with all the tasks. You can choose between teams, and change the planning scope. The tool is fully synchronized with Jira, so all updates in Jira are reflected in ActivityTimeline, and vice versa.
Here you may find projects with tasks:
The dashboard works with a simple drag-n-drop principle. Just choose the needed task and schedule it on the user timeline, that's it! All users have special workload indicators that help to understand whether a user is underloaded (yellow color), overloaded (red color), or workload is perfect (green color). When you schedule a task, the workload indicators will be updated accordingly, and you can resize issue to adjust time:
You can even split issues between multiple assignees:
It's also possible to create and schedule new Jira issues directly from the Dashboard:
You can also find internal custom events, like booking, sick leave, day-off, vacation, etc., that are not available in Jira, but are really helpful during holiday management and workload planning:
Another cool feature is that users can log worked hours from the dashboard, which really saves precious time:
ActivityTimeline offers not only user timelines but also provides a special Team Panel with team timelines. This feature provides a high-level planning and visibility option for teams, rather than focusing on individual resources.
It is particularly useful when you need to plan and manage workflows across multiple teams simultaneously. It offers a simple and efficient solution for long-term planning, allowing you to choose different scopes, such as months or quarters, based on your preferences. Workload indicators for separate teams are also available.
The Team mode is an excellent choice for large-scale planning, whether it's for a department or the entire company. It enables you to schedule a significant amount of workload, such as Epics or Program Increments, for the entire team without the need to allocate it to individual resources. This mode simplifies resource allocation and planning processes for managers, offering a streamlined approach.
You can choose whether to see only team timelines or a combined view of the team with users:
The app provides the Milestones panel, which helps you not to miss important events:
Personal Timeline Planning with ActivityTimeline
Personal planning timelines are used by individuals to manage their own tasks, deadlines, and priorities. These timelines assist in organizing personal workload & progress tracking. They enhance productivity, enable efficient time management, and help individuals stay on top of their responsibilities.
ActivityTimeline also offers a special Personal workspace for each employee that offers a comprehensive visualization of individual work, specifically tailored to each user with the help of a personal timeline. A team member gains a clear view of their tasks, projects, and personal calendar. The module provides visualization charts that illustrate workload and availability over a chosen time period.
One notable advantage of the app is its ability to accommodate internal events. Here we may the timeline of Bob, who can easily make bookings on the timeline for future meetings or trips that are not directly connected to Jira. These events are considered working hours and are accurately reflected in reports.
Additionally, Bob can conveniently log worked hours, allowing him to track billable and non-billable hours according to his preference. The Personal Cabinet provides a unified workspace where Bob can effortlessly manage his tasks, projects, and logged hours, all in one place.
Timesheet Timelines
Timesheet timelines track and document the actual time spent on specific tasks or projects. These timelines assist in capturing work hours, managing billable hours, and generating accurate reports for invoicing or payroll purposes. Timesheet timelines provide transparency and accountability in tracking work efforts and ensure accurate recording of time spent on different activities.
ActivityTimeline provides timesheet timelines for accurate time tracking. Users can leverage timesheet features to monitor and record the time dedicated to specific tasks and projects, These timesheets take into account non-working days, such as sick leaves, day-offs, and holidays, ensuring accurate and inclusive reporting. Additionally, the option to export timesheets as Excel files further enhance convenience and compatibility.
The user-friendly nature of ActivityTimeline, coupled with its intuitive interface and customizable parameters, makes generating timeline timesheet reports effortless. Users have the flexibility to define their preferred settings and effortlessly generate detailed reports.
Furthermore, project managers can utilize the app to effectively monitor project progress and identify any potential bottlenecks in the workflow, facilitating proactive decision-making and ensuring smooth project execution.
Forecasting Timelines
Forecasting timelines are used to predict and estimate future project milestones, deliverables, and resource requirements. These timelines consider historical data, project progress, and other factors to project future timelines. Forecasting timelines help in anticipating project outcomes, identifying potential risks, and making proactive decisions to ensure successful project delivery.
The app offers a wide variety of forecasting reports, empowering users to generate comprehensive reports encompassing team performance, resource utilization, project progress, and task completion. These reports serve as valuable insights to identify instances of overutilization or underutilization of resources, enabling informed adjustments to be made.
Conclusion
The visual representation of tasks and milestones in a timeline format enhances clarity and understanding, facilitating better decision-making and ensuring timely project delivery. The combination of Jira's native features and the added functionalities of the special timeline tools can make project planning & tracking more effective. By harnessing the power of timelines, teams can navigate project complexities, improve productivity, and ultimately achieve project success.
