Why do project managers migrate from MS Project to Jira and not the other way round?
Although Jira is not a project management tool per se, and Microsoft Project is, you’ll see the PM community migrating from the American product to the Australian one and not the other way round. Why do corporations bother to change their toolsets?
Just visit Google Trends to realize that this has been happening over the last two decades. MS Project has been continuously heading south, while Jira has been bound for the north. Why is a specialized tool (MS Project) loosing in favor of a tracking tool (Jira) that needs an extra app on top (BigPicture) to be a PM tool?
Because three things have changed since 1984, the year MS Project was born:
(1) Project managers have no longer a monopoly on keeping those Gantt charts up to date. And with the sophisticated MS Project, they were the only ones educated enough to do so.
(2) With a contemporary onboarding lasting 30 days or less — who does have time to learn more than a web browser-based Jira?
(3) And most importantly: MS Project lags behind Jira in terms of waterfall/agile methodologies. Microsoft Project is a waterfall-only tool, while Jira + BigPicture do waterfall project management and the agile one, as well as the black horses of many large organizations: hybrid projects — partially waterfall and partially agile.
These are the three general changes that have occurred in the last 20 years. They have to do with how software development has become an integral part of many projects. Let’s take a bicycle industry that is currently undergoing electrification, with batteries, controllers and so on. Such modern, software-related projects are the Jira domain. MS Project, on the other hand, was devised for large construction projects, representative of the 20th century.
Wish to dive deeper? Read this detailed MS Project vs. Jira + BigPicture comparison.
