Jira Dashboard all project status

[Mark Litherland]

This should not be this difficult.  I'm new to Jira but a longtime developer with a small team, so we don't have thousands of projects to manage.  I have built reporting and dashboard analytics in other systems for many years and what I want should be dead simple, but holy cow I think developers sometimes make things complex just because they can.

I need a simple "All Project Status" dashboard that I can share with the development team AND the sales team, that is really straightforward.  It just needs to show the backlog projects, work-in-progress, and completed projects, with resource allocation.  This is to handle two things - a visible project page for the sales team, so they know what we are slammed with when they decide to over-commit us to something new, and secondarily a "front door" for the dev team, to help them pick up additional work.

This should almost be out of the box stuff, I would think.  But I've spent a lot of time looking into filters, gadgets, and I'm coming up blank and getting frustrated.  I like the tool to build stories and get development going, but I also need high-level project visibility and that is a lot harder than it needs to be.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Projects don't have a status, they're just containers for issues and their configuration.  There's no concept of project status.

A couple of simple options though

1.  Look in the marketplace for the Portfolio management type add-ons (Portfolio, Big Picture, etc etc)

2. When creating a new project, have issue #1 be a "project health" type issue, and store the data you need on there (and automate it as much as possible)

[Mark Litherland]

Sounds like I don't need to be creating new projects at all, just stories within a monster container.  Thanks I'll check out the add ons too.

[Maarten Cautreels]

Hi Mark,

When you're talking about projects are you talking about issues in JIRA?

If you're talking about actual projects in JIRA I'm afraid this won't be possible. In JIRA a project is just a container for one or more issues to be worked on. 

It defines the configuration, like workflow, issue types, etc for all the issues within the project but a project cannot have a certain state. 

Hope this helps.

Best,

Maarten

[Mark Litherland]

Wow that's contrary to the definition of "project" in just about every other management system in the world, and maybe explains my frustration.  We have a dozen short-term development projects going on all the time, and I need a way to manage them.  So do I need to set up one big company "project" and then just handle our development stuff as stories or epics within it?

[Mark Walsh]

I'm with you Mark - is there nobody out there that is actually responsible for managing multiple projects and of course each project containing numerous issues.  Its very frustrating.

There is an external app Gantt Chart that will do the job - just frustrating its not a built in feature.