Remote Team Management: Jira Progress Tracking

Working in remote environments changed the business world. It brought both challenges and opportunities. Managing remotely requires a clear expectations and a specific strategy, especially for tracking time and productivity. Since teams are now spread out, time tracking becomes crucial. It allows managers to supervise projects and ensure team responsibility effectively.

In this article, we will cover the most common challenges of remote employees' tracking and the best tips and common practices for the management of a remote team in Jira.

Challenges of Remote Teams Management

To build a comfortable and efficient remote setup, you need to understand the main challenges of a remote workforce. This helps you address them immediately and stay on the same page with everyone.

Let's look at the most common ones:

Lack of visualization, inability to see the "big picture".

A fully remote teams often struggle because they lack a clear visual overview. It is difficult for members to see the overall scope or the "big picture" of a project. Without a shared physical office, visualizing project timelines and progress becomes a challenge. This often leads to misunderstandings about project goals and statuses.

Communication issues: different time zones and lack of collaboration tools.

Time zone differences and physical distance can severely impact communication in remote teams. Members working in different parts of the world may find it difficult to synchronize schedules for group meetings, updates, and collaborative events. Real-time collaboration becomes much slower when you can't align team meetings easily. Also to avoid misunderstandings, teams must establish clear communication norms from the start.

Monitoring of remote workers' progress.

Keeping an eye on the progress of remote workers is another challenge. Since you don't have a traditional office environment, it's harder to monitor the pace and quality of work. This can create uncertainty around deadlines and team performance.

Workload balancing.

Balancing the workload in a remote setting is complex. Managers often find it challenging to assess how much work each person can actually handle. This results in an uneven distribution of tasks. Some people end up overloaded while others have too little to do. This eventually hurts the morale of a productive team.

FractureCode Corporation manages track-and-trace development with teams spread across Europe and Belgrade. They struggled with inconsistent Jira time tracking before finding a dedicated solution. ActivityTimeline provided the structural reporting needed to comply with Danish labor regulations. This improved visibility across global offices and made daily time logging frictionless for employees.

Building a strong team culture.

Project Managers often find it difficult to keep team members engaged when they work from different locations. Without the organic in person interactions that occur in a physical office, creating team cohesion becomes a key element that requires deliberate and consistent efforts. Activities such as virtual team-building exercises and weekly meetings help close communication gaps and develop a supportive remote team culture.

Hybrid teams can overcome all these challenges with the right tools. Tools like Slack help with instant messaging. Video conferencing (virtual meetings) via Zoom, Google Meets, etc. strongly facilitates communication too.

When it comes to "big picture" visualization and team monitoring, many companies rely on Jira. It is a popular solution for project management, task tracking, and team collaboration.

Collaboration of Remote Teams in Jira

Jira is a versatile tool designed for issue tracking, project management, and operational efficiency. It's widely used by teams to manage complex projects and track progress in real time. Jira stands out for its customizable workflows, real-time reporting, and collaboration features. These functionalities make it an ideal choice for remote teams, providing a centralized platform for all project-related activities.

This platform is popular among teams of different sizes and types (business, creative, agile teams, etc.), as it provides various project templates to any taste:

It offers planning project boards for both non-technical and software teams, where they can create, schedule, and assign tasks, as well as monitor their status:

In Jira, teams have an opportunity to log time on issues, track worked hours, and bill clients accurately. The reporting section is also available.

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Jira is great for many tasks, but it has some gaps in resource planning. These limitations can make remote collaboration harder than it should be. One big issue is that Jira doesn't track where team members are located. This makes it difficult to set up the right holiday schedules for people in different countries. This ambiguity can also lead to confusion over time zones, creating synchronization challenges and communication barriers.

However, Jira compensates for this by offering a wide range of add-ons for remote management, available in the Atlassian Marketplace. One of the most popular project management tools is ActivityTimeline, which has proved to be an unmatched tool for remote work.

Let us support this opinion with examples in the next section.

Manage Remote Team Members with ActivityTimeline

ActivityTimeline serves as an effective resource planning add-on for Jira, designed to facilitate the planning, tracking, and reporting of resources, issues, and projects. This tool is especially useful for managing remote teams. It provides clarity on task assignments and deadlines, ensuring that all team members are staying aligned and informed.

The planning dashboard offers excellent visualization through timelines. This helps improve project management and makes team coordination much easier.

ActivityTimeline tool additionally provides:

An Individual Workspace for each team member;
Customizable Team Timesheets for accurate invoicing;
Reports and Charts for advanced data analysis.

Comprehensive Planning Board

ActivityTimeline's Planning Dashboard allows project managers to monitor team progress in real-time and at the same time helps team members coordinate their efforts, stay on track with their tasks. This visibility helps identify delays or issues early on, enabling timely intervention and course correction.

The dashboard looks like a calendar with tasks for multiple teams and projects, so you users can plan and manage tasks for different scopes. You can save specific dashboard settings with a "store current period" feature, so the planner always opens to the relevant timeframe, like the next quarter.

User & Team Timelines

The app provides clear visuals, including a Jira timeline for both teams and individuals. These are essential for managing tasks and significant milestones.

Each user has a personal timeline:

But there is the Team Panel that shows tasks assigned only to a team. This is very useful for long-term features or program increments.

Positions and Skills

Moreover, you can assign roles, responsibilities, and skills in the app, which is very helpful for remote teams. Finding the right person for a task is easy because you can search for users by their skills and positions directly in the planner.

You can also create various functional teams based on roles and skills or create teams based on their location:

Manage Workload & Availability

Workload balancing is simple with ActivityTimeline. Each user and team timeline has special Workload Indicators. These help protect work life balance by showing the actual workload to prevent burnout or work underload.

The workload is good if the indicator is green; if it is yellow the user or team is underloaded and red-overloaded. Based on this information Project Manager can reassign or reschedule tasks to avoid deviation.

There is a possibility to track the utilization of your team with the help of the Resource Utilization Forecast:

Availability mode is also available, so workload indicators can be changed to show the user availability if needed. Workload and availability tracking help immensely with resource allocation.

Leave Management Features

The dashboard includes tools for managing holidays, sick leaves, and custom events like business trips. You can create holiday schemes and assign them to teams or individual users. This is essential for managing international teams with different schedules.

Companies can align the app with their HR rules by setting global or individual vacation cycle start dates. Managers have granular control over approvals and can enable or disable them for specific events. A quick approval filter in the issue panel also allows managers to see all pending requests instantly.

Personal Workspace for Each Employee

Each team member has a personal workspace to view their work schedule and track tasks. Users can manage their deadlines and prioritize work according to their preferences. It also shows how busy they are during a specific period. Additionally, users have the option to log their worked hours, differentiating between billable and non-billable time, directly from their workspace.

The personal schedule syncs with Google Calendar and Outlook, so users can see external meetings and log time from them in a few clicks.

How to Track the Time of Remote Employees?

ActivityTimeline enables employees to log hours using various timesheet templates. You can select the desired values, teams, users, and projects, making use of pre-existing templates or crafting your custom timesheets.

Managers of distributed teams can also log work on behalf of team members when they are away. To keep financial data and billing accurate, administrators can set rules that prevent users from logging time too far in the past.

These timesheets provide in-depth insights into how time is allocated across various tasks, giving project managers the ability to spot potential overwork or underuse in resource distribution.

With the provision of comprehensive timesheet reports, project managers can examine time entries at both the individual and team levels, aiding in accurate financial assessments, client billing, and invoicing processes.

Report on Distributed Teams

ActivityTimeline offers a wide range of Jira Reports and charts for both resources and projects.

Users can report on various data, including capacity and resource distribution, bookmark reports, and export them like an Excel file effortlessly.

Conclusion

In the era of digital transformation, managing a remote team has become a norm rather than an exception. Virtual teams are very common and more companies have started accepting remote or part-remote forms of collaboration with pleasure.

With the advent and development of collaboration tools, distance became nothing and the overall working experience became more comfortable for employees, as they can save much of their time and work from any spot of the world effortlessly. With professional tools like Jira, ActivityTimeline, Zoom, and others, companies working remotely can keep tabs on every process, stay in touch, gain success, and enjoy their online workplace.