Use Case: How IT Research Company Extended Jira Reporting With Power BI Custom Solution

There is no doubt about the importance of Jira in business analytics as the instrument that helps teams track their job from marketing to engineering and more. It helps to boost the efficiency of companies without juggling a lot of documentation, conferences, chats, tables, and diagrams.

This article aims to emphasize the advantages of complex Jira reporting through the case of the Leading IT Research Company by analyzing Jira data with a custom BI solution. The Power BI tool can maximize Jira efficiency in huge progress and a real example of our client experience shows how it helps in the realities of the modern business environment.

Jira is a powerful tool to develop businesses and projects, making administrative responsibilities easier to run. Meanwhile, the goal of business intelligence currently is to transform a huge amount of data into useful insights to manage the project through actionable business decisions. Nowadays Power BI is the most leading and efficient tool for this goal in the business intelligence industry. It makes sense to integrate Power BI with Jira if the company wants to be effective and profitable in the long run because Power BI makes it possible to get the necessary information at a glance.

Jira reporting helps ensure successful and smooth project management, it offers agile reporting for Scrum or Kanban teams with different charts and diagrams. You will be offered different standard reporting with pre-configured settings and filtering options. However, either reporting will be within the project and in order to achieve cross-project or cross-instance reporting you will require to use additional tools. The same goes for reports in which you wish to include Jira custom fields or Atlassian Marketplace Apps custom fields. With the help of Power BI, you will be able to consolidate different data sources including custom fields, in one core place to produce custom reports for better insight and improved development.

A lot of reports are much easier to build in Power BI, as you can build one convenient Power BI dashboard instead of a number of Jira Charts. Additionally, Power BI offers rich visualizations for better data understanding.

Jira provides real-time reporting for you to monitor project progress and respond accordingly on time. With Power BI you will be able to build various reports based on actual Jira data. What does it mean? Data export takes some time and depending on the data volume and what method you choose, it can take from seconds to hours. All that you need is to schedule a data refresh according to your preferences, the rest will be done automatically.

If your requirements for complex reporting go beyond standard possibilities, you definitely need a custom solution. But quite often this solution is not profitable as it takes a long time to implement, plus there is no guarantee that it will meet all business needs. Here is why an alternative like Power BI Connector is the solution for this issue.

If you require custom reports, manage a large number of projects across Jira, and struggle to keep track of complex project management, Power BI Connector for Jira is exactly for you.

Power BI Connector allows customized reports and makes it possible to widen necessary data. With Power BI Connector you can have all your projects on a single view and it helps to keep the focus on tasks and make decisions on time. Moreover, project managers can analyze the work percentage completed in relation to its total volume, they can check whether there is a risk of breaking deadlines, what factors influence it, and also get a general picture of the remaining work and whether it is possible to achieve the expected result at all.

The idea to develop Power BI templates appeared in order to satisfy customer demands and to allow Jira users to see Power BI dashboard examples that they can build while using our Power BI Connector for Jira.

You can now create Jira reports in Power BI in just three simple steps. Simply choose one of the built-in Jira dashboard templates, set up the auto-generated data source, and insert generated link into Power BI. Check more detailed information here. We offer a wide variety of templates that meet custom requests: Jira Project Dashboard, Jira Service Management Dashboard, Jira Sprint Dashboard, Jira Sprint Time Report, Jira Work Log Report / Jira Time Work Report, Jira Cumulative Flow Diagram Project, Helicopter View / Jira Project Overview Report and Jira ITSM Issues Created Report, it is certain you have what to choose from. This bank of templates is easy to implement and work with.

Each available Power BI report template includes pre-configured data sources. Each data source already has all of the fields needed to create a Jira report using the corresponding template. As a result, Power BI Connector for Jira provided the most automated process for creating Jira reports with dashboard templates, eliminating the need for our client to manually select the tables and fields needed for reports.

Alpha Server's client is a USA company that provides technological research and consulting. The staff is over 5000 employees. It conducts technology research and shares its findings with large international corporations, government agencies, software firms, and asset managers.

As the result, a lot of teams to manage, complex projects to run and huge amounts of raw data to analyze to achieve necessary profit and development.

First, Jira is being used by the company for project management because project managers require a tool that reports data in accurate, easy-to-understand formats, allowing them to see how projects are progressing and improve their business outcomes.

However, our client met a wide variety of issues because of Jira's features. For example, they faced limitations in data analysis shortly, which is not convenient with the volume of raw data they analyze. At the same time, it starts to be easy to lose control of deadlines or any other important details. No need to add that it affects the overall outcome and results in the profit of the company.

The client has been considering developing a custom solution for their own needs. But after evaluating the pros and cons they realized it is not a way to follow, because multiple levels of management such as planning, preparing, developing, documenting, maintaining, upgrading, etc., takes a lot of time, money, and resources. Creating their own custom solution is a complicated task for them.

Issue 1 As a project lead, to know how many tasks the team completed in each Sprint.
Issue 2 For each project member, to know how many specific epics were completed by him/her.
Issue 3 As a project manager, to see how many requests made to the teams were managed.
Issue 4 As a project lead, to know how many days items are staying in the backlog?
Issue 5 As a project administrator, to see the status of each of the projects across Jira.

With Power BI Connector for Jira, the team of our client was able to track the progress during the Sprint and review the Sprint in retrospect. It provided a comprehensive view of all the tasks associated with a Sprint, as well as their current status.

So, now the client can build Sprint reports where team leaders can easily control the number of completed tasks per sprint or the entire project. Because of the built-in functionality, it is now possible to track any required data, either specific epic, tasks, or all projects in Jira.

Power BI dashboards based on customized data allowed our client to check the number of requests made to the team and identify items in the backlog. With the recently developed pre-configured templates for Power BI Jira Dashboards, our client was able to simplify data management and significantly shorten the time spent on data export. As a result, Power BI Connector for Jira provided the most automated process for creating Jira reports with dashboard templates, eliminating the need for our client to manually select the tables and fields needed for reports.

Power BI Connector for Jira appears to be the right way to solve issues of the client. A diverse set of features aims to meet specific needs and it provides a flexible approach to creating custom reports based on multiple data sources in minutes as a ready-to-use solution for effortless Jira Power BI integration. Furthermore, it does not necessitate any technical knowledge to configure or implement.

No matter the field your business is from, raw data analysis is essential to succeed in our highly competitive environment. If you using a tool with voluminous data that needs to be analyzed but native reporting possibilities don’t meet your requirements, don’t skip the part of digging deeper into reporting, just find the perfect solution to optimize the process and minimize the efforts.

From this particular use case, we can conclude that one custom solution can solve a bunch of issues in the most simple way. With Power BI Connector for Jira, you can bring up all data on your screen in a comprehensive visualized dashboard that leads you to the best business decisions.