I Planned My Entire Wedding In Jira

Introduction

I recently got married on March 16th of this year, and since everything seems to be calming down and getting back to normal, I thought I would write about how I was able to utilize my project management skills, and more specifically Jira skills, to create a beautiful and extremely organized wedding in just 4 months.

Now, I am not the type of person who will bury their head in the sand in an attempt to ignore a stressful situation. Nevertheless, when I encounter a stressful situation, I make sure I do everything in my power to fix whatever is going wrong, or try to ensure that the event will go off without a hitch. Because of this, I knew that the instant I got engaged, I was going to have to find a way to calmly organize the planning process for my wedding, or else my brain was going to explode from all of the different ideas, schedules, and “what if’s.”

Luckily, thanks to my previous project management experience and wonderful Calix mentors, Sasha B. and Derek Peters , I knew the perfect tool that I would end up using from the engagement all the way up to the day of the wedding. Jira is most widely known for being a popular project management tool utilized by companies all around the world, but many have found that its features are also great for personal projects and everyday planning. With that being said, I decided I wanted to combine Jira’s different uses to create an everyday project management tool for my wedding! After all, isn’t a wedding just like a huge project, perhaps with a little more input from family and friends? ;)

When I originally told my family and bridal party that I was planning my wedding in Jira, I received a mix of reactions. Since my fiancé knew how excited and confident I was in my decision, he was very supportive. However, I did receive a few loving eye-rolls and some, “Of course this is something you would do,” responses. Honestly, I don’t blame them as this was definitely the nerdier way to approach such an exciting time of life, but hey, this sounded like a fun and efficient way of planning to me, so why not? However, I wanted to make sure that everyone who was involved with putting our special day together knew what was happening at all times, so I had to ensure that this Jira project made sense to everyone.

How It Worked

The first thing I did was create epics of every large category that was vital in the success of our wedding, and “assign” them to the person I put in charge of handling each one. Some examples include photography, flowers, catering, etc. Then, I created stories and subtasks under each epic, for instance, meetings with the photographer, choosing a floral preservationist, and sending the final balance into the caterer, and “assigned” each of them to a person that would then report to the person handling their overarching epic. This system was extremely useful because it allowed me to spend more time on my own tasks rather than feeling like I needed to constantly supervise every single decision made.

Next, and probably the most helpful aspect of the project, was adding in start and due dates for each task. Like I mentioned in the beginning, I have a tendency to let my brain run rampant with all sorts of possibilities that I think up during the day. This is why start and end dates are so useful! Adding in start dates for each task gave me peace of mind that 1) I have a set date for when I will allow myself to go full force into that given task, and 2) I do not have to think about that specific task until the start date hits. Not only was this a helpful stress reliever, but it also ensured that I did not have too many things going on at once and that everything was carefully accounted for in the timeline.

Of course, not everything happened as we had originally planned. Once we nailed down a budget and secured a date with our venue, we realized we would have to be very intentional with how we used our now 3 months left before the wedding. All of our hiccups were relatively minor, and thankfully, I ensured that our timeline allowed for surprises here and there, and that we had a nice buffer to get things back on track if needed. Our biggest surprise was that our photographer stopped replying to our messages and calls and we were forced to find a different photographer two weeks before the wedding, but as you can probably tell, we were able to find a new one that was exactly what we were looking for!

Another helpful tool that I utilized was the ability to create different pages that could help me keep track of items like budget, timeline, and extra things to remember. I had just started working as a wedding coordinator at this time, and I was interested to see how long it would take me to plan a 300+ person wedding, what tasks would take the most amount of time, and how much a wedding of this magnitude would cost, so that I could use this information for client weddings later down the line. Because I had these pages to look back on after the wedding, some tasks shocked me with the amount of time they took! For instance, the wedding cake and cupcakes took me about 5 hours from the start of the research to when final decisions were made, whereas tablecloths somehow (and sadly) took me over 20 hours to finalize. (Pro tip to anyone planning a large wedding: DO NOT buy your own tablecloths. Rent them. The money you save when buying them is NOT worth the hassle!). All that to say, it has been very interesting looking back at where exactly my time and money went during the process.

The Day of the Wedding

The actual day of the wedding went about as well as we could have asked for. Everything pretty much went as planned, except for very minor things that didn't matter in the end. The vendors all came through, everyone remembered their dresses/suits, the food was delicious, photos were beautiful, and many guests exclaimed to Davis Hawkins and I how happy they were to be there and how lovely the wedding was. My mom later received cards from people in the mail talking about how wonderful the day was and how they appreciated all the little details we put into it! After going back into Jira and seeing how much time went into all of those details, I am so thankful that the guests appreciated them as much as we did!

Conclusion

Overall, I am very glad I decided to utilize Jira to help plan my wedding. I personally have never used Jira for anything outside of work-related tasks, so this was a fun way to learn more about Jira’s functionalities and make it my own! As you can see in the photos I’ve attached, my project wasn’t anything fancy, but it worked well for me and was easy for other people in the wedding to understand! I also want to add, our photographer told me on the day of the wedding that out of all of the many weddings he has shot before, this one was by far the most organized one he’s ever been to. That was all the praise I needed.