This isn’t our first time talking about Jira and its multiple modules, actually, we have several different articles about it you can check out here if you want to understand more about this software.
However, today we will be focusing on Jira Portfolio and Jira Core, two of the modules that are completely dedicated to managing projects of all kinds, specially software development projects.
Keep in mind, both jira portfolio and jira core take care of two different sides of project management, one focusing solely on creating plans to tackle down your projects, and the other focusing on the workflows of a single process. Let’s take a look.
What is Jira Core
Defined by Atlassian, Jira Core is an application that allows you to manage your workflows through their platform. From running projects, to tracking tasks, you can manage anything related to your workflows from Jira Core.
With Jira Core you can:
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Manage all kinds of projects
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Monitor any vital details
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Measure your team’s performance
The way Jira core does this is through managing issues, projects and workflows all within a same platform. Now, we aren’t going to tell you how to set up these issues since we already have a full article on that, here. But what we will do is talk about how it works.
First, there are the issues. Issues are nothing but tasks that you need to get done in order to finish up a project. Keep in mind, you can arrange these issues into different types depending on the project you’re carrying on.
Second, there are projects. In Jira Core, projects are just a way to group your issues, assign an administrator and provide all the necessary information for these issues to be tracked down through time.
Last, but not least, there are workflows. The workflows are just the way issues will be processed in an specific project. Through workflows, people in your team can visualize every step required to complete a task, update it and facilitate the transition from one step to another.
To put it simply, you create issues, your group them in projects and create workflows to manage each task. This way, as a software developer, you are able to break down your projects into small steps and visualize them in a much organized way.
The fact that Jira core automatically generates a workflow for every issue created represents a advantage for software developers who have to handle big, complicated projects with many different steps involved.
Benefits of implementing Jira Core
We have mentioned this before in our previous blogs, but Jira core is a flexible platform that allows software developers and project managers to organize, manage and carry out projects in a much more effective way.
Amongst the benefits of implementing Jira Core for project management, are:
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Organize all of your tasks in one place: Through Jira Core you can create an issue for every minor or major task involved in your project and assign a workflow through it, increase your organization skills.
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Be able to monitor details: Not only can you visualize your workflows through this platform, but you can monitor every detail including status updates, comments and attached documents. It allows you to measure performance: With Jira core you can keep track of what tasks are currently in progress, which team members are working, which have the most workload and so on. It allows you to gain a better insight of every step regarding your project.
What is Jira Portfolio
We have a complete blog dedicated to this which you can find here, but to put it simply, Jira portfolio is a software designed to help software developers create and manage plans to get a better perspective of the development process.
The thing about Jira Portfolio is that it can be used as an agile software development tool, meaning you gain a visual image of your work and the processes involved, even better, you to gather and visualize the team involved in the project and the different tasks they are carrying out.
The main difference between Jira portfolio and Jira core is the fact one focuses on workflows required to finish out a project, meanwhile the other focuses on creating plans to tackle down a major project.
Basically, you can use Jira Core to manage a software development process through workflows, however, Jira Portfolio is the only tool that allows you to create, manage and visualize an accurate roadmap.
Benefits of implementing Jira Portfolio for software developers
Jira portfolio is about planning how you will carry out each projects and the steps necessary to do so. That being said, the top three benefits of implementing Jira portfolio are:
- Create short-term and long-term plans: Creating long-term plans can be a tricky thing to do when you don’t have a clear path of where you’ll take your projects, however, with Jira Portfolio, doing this is actually easy.
You’ll be able to create long-term plans by implementing their roadmap feature, moving along from small, less complicated steps, to much more complex tasks.
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It adapts to your own planning methods: Jira Portfolio can work with any planning method your company applies, it doesn’t matter if it is time-boxed planning or not, Jira portfolio supports it.
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Visualize the entirety of your project: The best thing about this module of Jira is that allows software developers to visualize how they will conclude a project.
This way you get a better insight of every step you must take, every part involved and how the project is moving along, allowing you to make adjustment at any moment if necessary.
In conclusion, both jira core and jira portfolio are necessary tools any software developer should learn how to implement when working on a large scale project. Now, as to which one is better, it depends on what you’re looking for.
Of course, we recommend implementing these two methods at the same time to manage different sides of your projects, however, if you still want to chose one, Jira Core is perfect to start out and get familiar with automated workflows.
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