One of the challenges on the Atlassian platform, and this is by design, is that you find yourself wanting additional views that may require custom development, or requires to purchase an additional costly Atlassian package that doesn’t fit the ROI of the department.
My team would come in to work very lean on custom software that would leverage an organizations Jira data via API. And those custom views could be exposed inside Jira, or could also run completely independently on another server. In the case of Panera, there were certain features of Jira Align that almost provided the desired views, but not completely, and there wasn’t a use case justification to buy Jira Align when we could develop something that was tailored to viewing their portfolio epics.
I was UX designer on this project. And I worked directly with multiple stakeholders at Panera. Weekly or bi-weekly I would present variations of designs. The number of variations depended on working with the lead developer and project manager as we discussed what directions made sense given the allotted hours and timeframe. This often for me was a sweet spot because the constraints dictated, what I perceived as a healthy scope and kept the touchpoints with the client very simple and decisive.
The Enterprise Roadmap application was exposed inside Jira under apps. And we could control the access to the application from on our additional application server in Azure. I was tasked with evolving feature development as it grew from usage by a small number of stakeholders to many team leads. Because portfolio epics often consist of both IT and non-IT projects, and various phases this application was a sort of hybrid Gantt timeline. It was built using Atlassian APIs and customizations to Apache E-Charts, plus additional services for optimization. Progress always went toward understanding the varying states of portfolio epics at a glance and refinement of that view so it could be customized per user. Epics could be expanded, filtered and a lot of research and discussion went into what data would show on tooltips and what tooltips would show where.
Anecdotally this type of project will almost always have a challenge of trying to infer the state of completion when certain data is not available due to Jira simply not being the appropriate vehicle for various parts of a project. Could be because of the make up of departments or often it’s because any time additional complexity is added to task management, it introduces a lot of overhead in task recording that will inevitably have to be trained and enforced. It’s when these cases arise you want to get creative. Not to dive too far into proprietary examples here, but let’s say you roll out a feature and that feature goes through certain test phases before it goes to a larger rollout. And those phases are completely outside the purview of Jira. With a custom application you can display additional data outside of the Jira API, from completely different platforms.
