Productivity Hacks in Project Management
Managing a software project or a program can become a daunting task at times, especially if you’re part of a growth company and work with a large team. At Capillary, our primary objective in Program Management Group(PMO) has been to reduce toil and automate things as much as we can. And adopting below tools(or pipelines) have helped us in achieving our goals and scale better. So, if you’re part of program management group(pmo) in your company and use any of the below tools, then do try these hacks/add-ons to make your work life easier.
- Jira & Structure Board
Roadmap planning is a cumbersome activity and standardising it across your teams can get challenging for the pmo function for central reporting. Below are some of the typical challenges that you’ll encounter in it when you have more than 4–5 teams involved.
Problems
- Multiple sheets: People love flexibility and hence, even if you create a template they will always deviate from what is guided, resulting in multiple document standards.
- Multiple Jira Boards: Each agile team had its own boards and filters to track the list and progress which was difficult to manage.
- Cross team collaboration: Cross team tracking became lot challenging and we started seeing frequent misses.
Solutions
Jira is a popular tool from Atlassian to manage projects, tickets and more.We did planning(quarterly) in google sheets for a very long time and ran sprints too from it. But when we grew bigger, we needed better tools to run our agile projects. Managing versions in excel and multiple links & tabs in google spreadsheet every quarter was becoming difficult. Also, prioritisation and ranking was messier since our backlog list were high(50+ in some of my teams).
We started using Structure (marketplace app from almworks for Jira) boards to bridge this gap and also track some of the important metrics in software development. Jira backlogs helps significantly in this. With #ranking feature in Jira prioritisation becomes lot easier. Firstly, you can use the same backlog link every quarter for a team. And then, ranking is done just by dragging items on UI. This makes it dynamic and transparent. You can also see the auditing around ranking in issue history. So you know when was any particular issue prioritised or deprioritised and by whom.
Once your planning is done, you can track that efficiently via a structure board(using a single label for all the planned Jira’s). The beauty of structure board lies in its capability of grouping data basis any in-built or custom field in Jira. And you can do it at multiple hierarchical levels. Meaning, grouping inside grouping. Isn’t that cool!. At Capillary, multiple development teams also use different structure boards to track their daily reporting needs like open bugs, quarter deliverables, hit-rate, etc.
This solved our viewing and tracking problem. But still leaves you with the issues of cross team dependencies and collaboration. Cross team dependencies are one of the most critical puzzle to solve within an organisation and is also a major reason for project delays. To solve this, almworks has a cross team planning tool, named Cross Team PI Planner which can be used to track cross team dependencies. Below video shows the setup of the tool for a sample project.
2. Jira & Google Sheets
Google spreadsheets is an important collaborative tools in any growing organisation. The ubiquitous usage of it is a testament itself to its capabilities. Now, although Jira has inbuilt dashboard capabilities, it doesn’t provide the flexibility of viewing data as effectively as you can have in a spreadsheet. This is where Jira-Google Sheet integration comes handy. Google has a free marketplace app, Jira cloud for sheets, which helps you integrate your Jira data with Google spreadsheet. This also has auto-refresh functionality which makes sure that data doesn’t get stale. This helps in building dynamic reports on Google Sheets while data can be updated in scheduled frequency at the backend. For a very long time in Capillary, this has been one of the important ways to create a shared, up to date automated reports within the organization. Creating a report is one time activity and with auto-refresh feature, you avoid the manual intervention. Below is a quick video of how you pull the record in spreadsheet. You can then use this data to create pivots and reports.
3. Google DataStudio
Google datastudio is a recent but an important addition to Capillary’s internal reporting prowess. Google data studio has multiple built-in data source connectors. We use two of them heavily. PostgreSQL and Google Sheets. Most of our data, for e.g.NewRelic, Site24X7 REST API monitoring, Jira and more are exported to a PostgreSQL database instance at an hourly/daily frequency. We use hevodata (no-code low code pipeline tool) to build this data ingestion pipeline. This makes sure that the data is periodically updated at your set frequency (as small as 5 min).
Top 4 reasons why we use datastudio over other reporting platforms.
- Easy sharing of reports within the organisation.
- Automate email report.
- Multiple data visualisation option when compared against pivot tables in sheets/excel etc.
- Interactive reports, controlling filters and date ranges.
These hacks help you manage multiple programs at scale. So that you spend less time fetching & reporting data from the team and work on real insights that emerges from it. Data backed conversations are always effective and objective and these hacks make sure that you have right set of data to begin your conversation within the team. Do use them in your work and let us know how it went for you.
