In any project, progress is something that needs to be tracked, understood, and communicated.
For project managers, crafting a progress report is a chance to tell the story of the project in motion: what’s been accomplished, including key accomplishments related to project milestones, where things stand now, and what lies ahead.
Yet despite Jira being one of the most widely used project management platforms, many users still struggle to create progress reports that are clear, meaningful, and easy to act on. Jira is excellent for managing issues and assigning daily tasks. But when it comes to presenting the big picture or sharing a one-page progress report with stakeholders, the platform falls short. Jira visualization can help enhance custom reporting and presentation.
That’s where tools like ActivityTimeline come in — not to replace Jira, but to turn raw data into structured updates that keep everyone informed and aligned.
Stay ahead with real-time reporting. Optimize your resources with smarter tools.
In this guide, we’ll explore the challenges of building progress reports in Jira and introduce ActivityTimeline, a powerful app that transforms Jira data into visual, real-time progress report templates tailored for agile and time-based teams.
What is a Progress Report in Jira and Why Does It Matter?
In Jira, a progress report is a structured overview that tracks how much work has been completed, how much remains, and how closely the execution aligns with the original plan. It typically includes:
- Completion percentages of issues
- Time spent vs. time estimated
- Breakdown of tasks across Epics, Stories, and Sub-tasks
A progress report is not the same as a status report, though the two are often confused. While a status report may focus on what’s currently happening, a comprehensive progress report provides a fuller view — looking back at completed tasks, highlighting major milestones, and projecting what’s expected moving forward.
Writing progress reports is a critical part of modern project management. When done right, they:
- Offer a high-level overview of the project’s status
- Keep internal teams and external stakeholders updated
- Act as a reference point for the next progress report
- Feed into the final report and post-project analysis
Yet in practice, many teams still rely on spreadsheets, email threads, or disconnected tools to prepare these reports — often wasting time and introducing inconsistencies that make it harder to present the larger goals of a project, keeping stakeholders informed.
Why does it matter? Clear progress tracking leads to:
- Smarter planning. Knowing how your team is performing lets you adjust future plans more realistically.
- Stakeholder alignment. Transparent reporting keeps everyone informed, reducing surprises.
- Risk mitigation. Identifying lags early allows for timely interventions and course corrections.
Challenges of Progress Reporting in Jira Without a Dedicated Tool
Jira was designed as an issue tracker. It works wonderfully when you want to assign tasks, document bugs, or plan sprints. Out of the box, Jira doesn’t provide an easy way to generate structured, multi-level progress reports. Users often face:
- Manual data collection. Aggregating information from Epics, Stories, and Sub-tasks is time-consuming.
- Inconsistent formats. There’s no standard view, making it hard to compare data across teams.
- Limited time tracking. Built-in time tracking is basic, with few options to visualize or analyze time spent.
- Poor visibility across hierarchies. Progress at the Epic level doesn’t automatically reflect the status of child issues.
The result is a lack of clarity and wasted time compiling reports that don’t tell the full story.
The data is there, but pulling it into a coherent progress report template that reflects hierarchy, time tracking, and effort across a particular project? That takes manual effort. For project managers working on tight timelines, it’s an unnecessary layer of complexity.
You can get a list of open or closed tickets. But what about the relationship between Epics, Stories, and Sub-tasks? What about a visual outline of what’s been planned versus what’s actually been delivered? What about seeing how time estimates compare to actual time logged?
This gap often leads to poorly structured reports that fail to deliver the clarity stakeholders expect.
How ActivityTimeline Helps You Tell the Right Story
ActivityTimeline was built to bridge this gap — not just to create reports, but to build communication tools that help project teams articulate progress clearly.
#1. Visualize Progress with Hierarchical Project Progress Reports
It starts with structure. ActivityTimeline introduces a dynamic tree view that clearly shows project hierarchies from Epics, Projects, Initiatives to Stories and Sub-tasks. The platform reads your Jira data and presents it in a visual, hierarchical format. Instead of isolated tasks, you see how Stories connect to Epics, and how the completion of Sub-tasks contributes to overall progress. This is essential when you want to reflect the project plan and its alignment with project milestones.
This visual structure allows you to:
- Instantly see how child issue progress affects parent tasks
- View key information such as Assignee, Due Date, Status, Time Spent, and Remaining Estimate
- Customize the hierarchy to match your needs
📌 Use case: A project manager can quickly identify bottlenecks — like a Story that's incomplete and holding back an Epic’s progress — without manually digging through each issue.
#2. Choose Your Own Progress Calculation Method
Just as importantly, ActivityTimeline gives you flexibility in how you calculate progress. Depending on your audience and objectives, you might focus on the number of completed issues, or compare time spent vs. original estimates to gauge performance.
ActivityTimeline offers two flexible calculation methods:
- By completed issues: Ideal for agile teams focused on task closure.
- By logged time vs. estimates: Useful for time-based teams needing insight into effort and efficiency.
📌 Real example: A team preparing a report for senior management switches from issue-based to time-based calculation to demonstrate resource allocation more clearly.
#3. Create Reports Based on Projects, Epics, or Filters
Not all reports need to show everything. ActivityTimeline allows you to:
- Generate reports for entire Jira projects, specific Epics, or custom Jira filters
- Filter by teams, phases, or initiatives
- Customize who sees what for better internal or stakeholder-specific reporting
📌 Benefit: More relevant, concise reports that tell the right story to the right audience.
#4. Generate and Refine Reports in Real-Time
After selecting your criteria, generate your report by clicking on the Customize Report button on the top right corner. You can then:
- Hide “done” tasks to reduce clutter
- Switch between progress calculation methods
- Add or remove fields on the fly
It is also possible to hide “done” or child issues from the report, but they will still be included in the calculation of the report:
Planned vs. Actual Report: Measure Estimate Accuracy and Team Efficiency
For projects that rely heavily on time and resource management, the Planned vs. Actual Report in ActivityTimeline is a game changer. It compares the expected time (from original estimates) with actual logged hours, offering a reality check on how your project timelines are unfolding.
#1. Compare Original Estimates with Real Logged Time
ActivityTimeline’s Planned vs. Actual Report helps you track whether your initial estimates were accurate:
- Compare Planned Time (original estimate) with Actual Time (logged + remaining)
- Identify tasks that consistently run over time
You can include Time of Sub-tasks into the Parent Tasks to ensure that the report captures the full scope of work, including any time spent on sub-tasks, and rolls it up into the parent task’s time calculations.
This report is highly beneficial for monitoring project performance, tracking team efficiency, and identifying tasks or projects that were underestimated or overestimated, helping to refine future planning and estimation processes of JIRA tickets, time estimates (original and remaining), time spent already on the tickets, and ticket status.
📌 Use case: Spot patterns of underestimation early, so you can re-evaluate estimation practices.
#2. Visual Indicators for Deviation Status
Color-coded statuses make it easy to scan and understand:
- 🟢 On Track: Actual time matches planned estimate
- 🔴 Underestimated: More time was needed than estimated
- 🟡 Overestimated: Less time was required
📌 Smart risk management: Managers can step in before minor delays turn into major issues.
#3. Strategic Insight into Team Capacity and Resource Use
Used strategically, this report helps project managers see where things might go off course before it’s too late. It encourages deeper conversations — not just about tasks that took too long, but about challenges faced, why delays happened, and how future planning can improve. Use these insights to:
- Prevent burnout by seeing where teams are overloaded
- Avoid underutilization by reallocating available resources
- Improve future sprint planning and forecasting
To generate a report, you must configure the parameters such as period, teams, projects, group by, etc. For example, if you select Group By Sprint, a summary row will be displayed, providing an overview of the sprint’s overall status.
Once the report is generated, you can further refine and adjust it dynamically by clicking on the Customize Report button on the top right corner.
Finally, Planned vs Actual Chart offers an insightful overview of a team's performance over a specific timeframe. It's designed to empower team leaders and managers with the ability to compare the team's capacity against the work that was planned and the work that was eventually delivered.
Here’s what it does:
- Team Capacity (only when reporting by Team): This represents the maximum workload a team can handle during the selected period. It's based on the combined capacities of all team members.
- Scheduled Time: This represents the amount of work that was scheduled for the team across various projects. This is based on the Original estimate of Jira issues, ActivityTimeline Bookings & Placeholders.
- Logged Time: Depicts the hours that were actually worked by the team, giving a real-world picture of the team's output based on time submitted through Log Work dialogue (either in Jira or in ActivityTimeline).
Best Practices for Writing Progress Reports with ActivityTimeline
One of the overlooked benefits of creating smarter reports is that it saves time — both for the person writing the report and the people reading it. A well-structured one-page report with a clear executive summary allows decision-makers to absorb ongoing information quickly and provides valuable feedback. It also becomes a living document that teams can refer back to in retrospectives or weekly check-ins.
And because ActivityTimeline integrates directly with Jira, the reporting process becomes part of your workflow.
- Use the Project Progress Report as your foundation
Start with a clear visual of the project hierarchy and current progress. - Add the Planned vs. Actual Report as a quality check
Use it to verify whether your team is delivering on time and within estimates. - Customize fields and filters
Tailor reports for stakeholders: executives may want a high-level view, while team leads may prefer granular data. - Save and reuse report templates
Reduce repetitive work by creating templates for weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reporting. - Share/export reports easily
Reports can be exported or shared directly from ActivityTimeline, reaching stakeholders inside or outside of Jira. You’re simply using the data that already exists, but presenting it in a way that’s structured, visual, and communicative.
Ready to supercharge your reporting? Dive in and see the difference for yourself!
Conclusion
The best reports don’t just say “Here’s what we did.” They say: Here’s how we’re progressing toward our goals. Here’s what we’ve learned. And here’s what we’re doing next.
That’s what makes progress reports important in every organization that values clarity, transparency, and continuous improvement. It’s to present progress in a way that inspires confidence, invites collaboration, and empowers your team to keep building toward the future. With the right project management software and a thoughtful approach to reporting that aligns with your objectives, you can turn every update into a meaningful step forward.
