Project Management Tool
Ivan Skrypka
CEO. CyberSecurity. Helping Healthcare,Insurance and Fintech sectors prevent cyber attacks, safeguard sensitive data, stay compliant with industry regulations using penetration testing methods and security audits.
JIRA is a great tool to be in touch with the development team. The gradual data aggregation from every team member is accessible in a dashboard format for every planning and retrospective. This is a vital tool for a project manager to stay on track and make realistic projections on the project milestones.
Things get trickier when your company moves to several simultaneous ongoing projects and then some more coming in for the estimation.
To have a realistic projections of several ongoing projects there has to be at least one specialist who is informed about the details of every one of these projects.
Then this (presumably extremely busy) person has to get into the details of the incoming project and then we have some realistic projections of how much resources could be allocated to the new project and how it will change things. More often what the companies get is lots of exhausting cross-team meetings where participants get exhausted and projections are done using the “pull the numbers out of your ass” method to end this torture as quickly as possible.
Technically speaking a project manager performs the function of a PID controller for a project team. PID controllers are quite common. It is a device that smoothes out mechanical movements to be intuitively predictable for our body’s sensors. Your car has a bunch of these devices to enable things like cruise control.
Jira is a tool to provide the data input into the controller. Performing this PID function for multiple teams is a cognitive feat of the same level as running an ultramarathon is a physical feat. Doable but for a very small fraction of people.
The math behind these devices is clear for over a century. So… could we go one level above and make a simulation of multiple controllers (representing multiple simultaneous projects) and tweak their inputs into another one?
This is the idea behind our Project Resource Management plugin. Grab the data from multiple ongoing projects. Make quick projections of what will change if we do X. Make a beautiful interface on top of that. Good to go with the planning in cruise control mode.