How to use Jira for project management

monday reviews is our latest blog series where we provide the facts about different project management tools—no BS and no hyperbole needed. Keep scrolling for our analysis and to learn more about all the project management tools out there. Enjoy! 😊

If you’re looking for your business’s next project management platform you might have come across Jira.

Jira Project Management is popular with software development teams. But just because your dev team loves Jira’s bug and issue tracking features, does that mean you should use Jira project management across your whole business?

It’s a tough call.

Which is why we’re here to help. We at monday.com have done the digging for you to help you decide whether Jira project management has what you need for overall project management, or if its feature set is too narrow for your business.

This article will dive into Jira Project Management, how it works, and how it compares to project management alternatives like monday.com.

Let’s jump in!

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What is Jira Project Management?

Jira Project Management, also called Jira Software, is one of the three core Jira products. The other two are Jira Service Management, and Jira Core.

Given the advanced nature of its issue monitoring and bug tracking features, Jira Project Management was clearly designed with the needs of software development teams in mind.

Read more about the best software project management tools.

But does that make it right for other team members with different tasks and needs to consider?

Jira isn’t necessarily the right project management software for teams with a diverse set of needs and tasks to complete.

How does Jira Project Management work?

Built around agile methodology, Jira Project Management is specifically designed for agile teams that are familiar with this style of project management.

For this reason, software development and operations teams that love using the scrum framework (a common agile framework) may prefer Jira until they discover other more complete work management platforms.

But, if your team doesn’t know about agile methodology, or prefers another approach, it could be difficult to adjust to the unique style of workflow.

Jira Project Management has various features for team members to track and deliver projects:

• Scrum boards help you unify your team by making it easy to collaborate on complex and long-term tasks.

• Kanban boards make it easy to display all of your project related tasks in one place. You can quickly see who’s working on what, current progress and deadlines.

• Roadmaps enable your team to easily plan bigger sets of stories over different sprints. It’s easy to see what bugs are scheduled to be fixed.

• Agile reporting allows you to review the results of projects and help you better understand your team members’ work sprints for future tasks.

(Not to brag, but monday.com offers all these features as well… plus plenty of non-Agile options too.) If you’re looking for additional features that aren’t on this list, you may want to try another project management platform.

If you’re curious about how Jira stacks up against project management software Asana, read our breakdown on Asana vs. Jira.

Who should use Jira for Project Management?

Jira Software is specifically marketed toward software developers, scrum masters, and project managers. It is not designed for your average business user.

In other words, if you want your non-software team or anyone else in your business to be able to use the platform, you’ll need to run and attempt to integrate both versions. Which is obviously less than ideal.

A whole business solution: monday.com

monday.com is a project management platform that makes it easy to plan, organize, and track all of your company’s work in one place.

Whether your team prefers agile, waterfall, scrum or just needs to track who’s doing what, monday.com works for any framework you choose or dream up.

If your team of software developers still want to use Jira, they still can! You can easily integrate Jira with your monday.com Work OS to have the best of both worlds. Right now we have 40+ integrations so monday.com can be a complete solution for your whole business.

Discover how a Work OS can quickly become the hub for all work within an organization.

No matter whether you’re planning a trip to the moon or managing your business’s content calendar, we probably have a template for it (we have 200+ and counting).

Once you’ve picked your template it’s then easy to optimize it to your projects by dragging and dropping 30+ column types to create your ultimate workflow.

monday.com helps you easily collaborate with other team members too. Easily assign tasks, send messages, and add attachments to keep everything project-related in one place.

If you’re already a project management expert, you can build your template from scratch and make it as simple or complex as you please.

Intuitive, user-friendly designs mean your team won’t require any specialist training and will soon all be monday.com project management pros.

How does monday.com work?

monday.com lets you display and organize your project in a way that’s best suited to your business’s unique needs.

Once you’ve chosen a template, or built your own, the next step is to customize your board to match your personal preferences.

It’s simple to display your projects and tasks in an easily digestible and visual format that your team members will love looking at.

• Kanban helps you map out all tasks and sprints in a visually digestible format.

• Calendar displays tasks and projects in a monthly or yearly view.

• Gantt makes it easy to track tasks and ensure you’re hitting deadlines.

• Timeline enables you to view the overall time frame for tasks enabling you to manage deadlines more easily.

• Map makes your clients or team members’ location and country visible so that travel or time zone logistics become a breeze to manage.

• Form enables you to receive information from clients and input it directly to boards without having to do so manually.

• Workload allows managers to see which team members are busy with what tasks without the need for any back and forth.

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How do I use monday.com?

monday.com makes complex project management fun and simple. Once you know your way around the platform you’ll find it easy to manage multiple projects simultaneously.

If you’re wondering how to use monday.com, take this client management template example.

Color coding helps you see a list of open tasks and completed tasks. Each column helps users see the current status of the task and its priority level.

Timeline and estimated time columns help team leaders understand the current workload of their team members.

Who should use monday.com?

monday.com is well suited to managing a vast set of projects. From creating a content calendar to tracking your company’s invoices, our pre-built templates will help you organize your team’s workflow.

monday.com has everything your software development team needs, plus all the features your other departments have been hoping for. We’ve got project trackers and templates for everything from bugs to expenses, customers, material orders, and more.

Worried that your dev team won’t give up Jira without a fight?

You can seamlessly integrate it to monday.com. Your developers get to keep working the way they’re used to, the rest of your business unlocks the power of monday.com, and everyone comes out a winner.

What about pricing?

If you’re still uncertain about which project management platform to use, both Jira and monday.com have free trials, so you can base your decision off actual usage.

When it comes to paying for subscriptions to the platforms, here’s a full breakdown of Jira and monday.com’s individual features for each price tier:

Jira: 

• Free – For up to 10 users and 1 site.
• Standard – For up to 10,000 users and 250 GB of file storage.
• Premium – Access for 10,000 users and unlimited storage.
• Enterprise – Provides unlimited sites and storage.

monday.com: 

• Basic – Includes unlimited boards, over 20 column types, and unlimited free viewers.
• Standard – Provides 250 monthly automations, 250 integrations and timeline & gantt views.
• Pro – Includes private boards, time tracking, and a dashboard of up to 10 boards.
• Enterprise – Provides advanced reporting & analytics, multi-level permissions, and enterprise-scale automations & integrations.

Which solution is right for your team?

So there you have it, the full scoop on Jira Project Management, how it works, how you use the platform, its pricing, and an overview of how monday.com compares for project management solutions.

Every business is different and has a unique set of individual needs and requirements to take into consideration when it comes to project management.

Which is why we provide ultra-customizable and personalized work management solutions.

If you’re still wondering which project management platform to choose, go ahead and sign up for a free 14 day trial or get started with this free bug tracking template.

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