How can you monitor work progress in BigPicture?
BigPicture is currently one of the best Project Management tools in the Atlassian ecosystem. This app combined with Jira creates a completely new approach to modern project management.
In this article, we will focus on monitoring the work progress using BigPicture features, which are very important in everyday work. Following the work progress in BigPicture is not that difficult but sometimes it requires a little bit of effort because you need to enable some settings.
In BigPicture three separate areas might help monitor the work progress. The first one is the Gantt module, the second one is the Resources module and the last one is the Board module. Let’s dive right into the tool.
The Gantt module
In the Gantt module, you can observe your tasks and easily follow their work progress. Firstly, you have to enable the setting that allows you to show progress. When you enable the ‘Progress’ that will be shown on a bar on the tasks then you can immediately see when something is less or maybe more advanced than it should be. You can find it there:
Right after that, you will see that the color of the tasks’ bars is not pure. It is darker at the beginning and lighter towards the end. Those colors correspond to the percentage of completion which you can check if you have a time tracking field enabled:
This is something that is going to give you a very good indicator regarding what’s the progress of your task compared to what the progress should be according to how much time has already passed since the task should have been started.
On the other hand, if you want to see delayed tasks, you could turn on a setting that says ‘Overdue’. When it’s turned on you will see tasks marked as being late with the number of days they are late by. Their color will turn red (more than 7 days late) or yellow (3-7 days late):
There is also a line which is showing you the current date and is always visible. If it’s crossing the lighter bar color of the task it means that the task progress is not good enough. There might be valid reasons for that, but at least you know that it should be checked.
This is the way to check the work progress on the Gantt chart. Let’s learn about two other tools.
To find more information about the Gantt module, see also: BigPicture update March 2022
The Resources module
You can follow the work progress of the same tasks in the Resources module. What is important in the Resources module is that you can see how many hours are assigned to a specific person. The colors are telling you if the person is overloaded or not. Red is over 100% of available time, yellow typically is between 70-100%, and green means that the person still has some capacity available:
You could also change the view that is shown in the picture above and quickly turn it into percentages. This may help you to see some data more clearly.
But how you can check what’s the progress of the task or if there is a problem with the progress using the Resources module? Firstly, you have to switch the effort mode from the original estimate to the remaining estimate:
What will happen? If you switch the effort mode to the remaining estimate, you will notice that some colors and percentages have changed. As always, the values marked with red are your indicators that something is wrong with your task:
With the remaining estimate mode, BigPicture is telling you that some of the work has already happened in the past. Then it takes the remaining estimate and tries to apply it to any days that are still in the future of the task’s duration.
If we know for example that there’s only one calendar day left to complete the task and there are still many hours of estimated work to be done (more than 8, which is a full standard work day) and the task has to be completed by one person then obviously it will show you that the person’s availability is highly overreached.
It’s a great way of looking at the data when you’re in the execution phase. Allows you to quickly spot tasks that are going to be late.
If it’s a bit too complicated, remember that you can always reach out to us and ask for help. We’ll do the first session with you completely for free, no strings attached, and help you out as much as we can. It’s our way of contributing to the growing userbase of BigPicture and Jira. We truly want you to be happy working with these tools!
The Board module
The last part is definitely for the people that are more into the agile way of working or might be thinking about switching to the Agile approach. If this sounds familiar to you, let’s move to the BigPicture Board module.
In this case, we have the ‘Training Box’ project divided into two stages. There’s also a view of all tasks assigned to those stages and divided by teams:
Let’s focus on the area where task cards are visible. How can you follow the work progress in the Board module? As you can see in the picture below, there is the ‘work progress’ option visible above the task cards. This shows you how much of your stage/sprint/PI has already been completed. It’s worth mentioning that you can look at it with hours, man-days, or story points (which may be the best option in agile planning). You can also see how many story points are assigned to the task on every task card.
Furthermore, if you edit some data, for example, mark one of the tasks as done, and refresh the screen, the work progress will immediately increase. Thanks to that you can always check how is your project doing and react to any laggers.
Summing up
As you can see, you can monitor work progress in BigPicture combined with Jira using several different but undoubtedly time-saving features. Which is the best for you? It depends on the way you are working with your project data. Reach out to us to get advice from our experts!
Want to see some live action of monitoring work progress in BigPicture? See our latest video: Monitoring work progress in BigPicture
Have any questions? Contact us!
If you would like to learn more about BigPicture, talk about the best way of using the tool available in your company, talk about possible training or implementation help, remember that in Genius Gecko we are the experts in this area. We are working with BigPicture almost from the beginning and we are probably the most experienced people in the world currently when it comes to BigPicture project management. We might also add, that we are not the most expensive! 🙂
Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a free first session during which we will help you get the most out of this amazing Project Management tool.
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