Implementing BigPicture in large organizations
The BigPicture plugin for JIRA is now on the market for more than 2 years. During that time it was implemented in over 3000 organizations, some of them with tens or even hundreds of thousands of users. The tool is very flexible and can work properly out of the box, but some fine-tuning can make the life of large-scale customers much, much easier.
Go Enterprise
With more than a thousand of active users, you really should go with the Enterprise edition. Not only does it have advanced options (such as per-user holiday plans and cross-Program allocation view), but under the hood sports improvements related to large instances. JIRA Data Center in particular runs the best on BigPicture Enterprise.
You also get premium support, which does matter a lot. After all, every minute of unanswered questions may block hundreds of users from performing their tasks and creating value for the company.
Program setup
You should think about the overall hierarchy and number of Programs that you will need from the get-go. While you can create any number of them without issues from the technical point of view, admins and users often struggle to make their way through a messy setup. We definitely recommend a separate, high-level Program pulling in everything at once, and also supporting smaller ones for teams and initiatives. Smaller Programs simply load faster, making things just a tad snappier for those who click and type the data in. The large Program will ensure your shareholders and CEOs are all up to date and nothing is hidden from their eyes.
ProTip: The Program List can be filtered on the fly for less clutter.
Disable Feedback
At the bottom of our plugin we placed a shortcut to BigPicture’s support. However, in large organizations 1st line help is often done internally, for instance by the admins. Only actual problems (like bugs) are filtered from the stream of simpler questions and forwarded to the vendor or reseller.
The feedback modal can be disabled in JIRA administration->Add Ons->Gantt configuration.
Program presets
The Program Configuration section is only really useful for scenarios, where users create a lot of Programs using the “Program + new JIRA project” option. Keeping your projects organized will make the admins much happier, and introduce ease to their maintenance.
Adjust the permissions
Goes without saying, that the more people you have, the more setup is needed here. Not only does this improve security and introduces privacy to data, but takes some load off the plugin and gets rid of clutter, be it on the Program list or on the Roadmap.
ProTip: JIRA permissions are always respected, so if you have those in place, just specify who can create and see Programs and you’re good to go!
Stay up to date
Each small update of BigPicture brings small performance improvements. With 10 people, a 1% faster loading time means just 10 seconds saved. However, with 100,000 people, this number grows to an enormous 27.7 hours per each loading. That’s more than a full day of work!
Integrate your intranet
You most likely have a Confluence instance or other internal system different from JIRA, where data is stored and discussions happen. In BigPicture Enterprise, you can easily integrate it using custom actions:
