JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.
$10
per month
WorkflowMax
Score 8.1 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
WorkflowMax is a web-based project management solution.The platform offers end-to-end functionality standard to project management software, including time tracking, lead management, collaboration with external stakeholders, invoicing, integrations, and customizable reporting.
The Jira software works well for managing scrum boards and allocating resources to a task. When your Epics and Issues are set up properly, it can give you a good idea of where your team stands and the trajectory of your project. It is not the ideal solution if you need to provide documentation and support to people outside of your product teams or organization. It would benefit from having a public documentation or repository feature.
WorkflowMax is very well suited for a business that wants to track time billed by project, to have an easy way to generate invoices for those projects, and to keep track of overall productivity and invoice status. I imagine it can also be adapted to different types of businesses that deal in goods rather than services and time. I am not sure for which scenarios or businesses the program is not appropriate.
You can customize the notifications and this has helped us enormously to schedule dates that we overlooked. Also the templates are customizable which gives the company its own branding on its reports.
It is integrated with the Xero platform which makes it very useful to streamline the processes of billing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, petty cash flow and all the accounting and administrative area.
It also has a very complete mobile version, where we can be present and monitor the progress of projects in real time, no matter where we are.
Currently the timesheet function allows staff to input time for overlapping periods which can cause some headaches when it comes to payroll and invoicing. We understand this is being addressed.
The amount of flexibility in the product can create some challenges when setting up the jobs database at the onset. It is a daunting challenge but worthwhile when completed correctly and rolled out across the firm. Adding new jobs is much easier.
No search function to find a specific job, you have to scroll through all jobs allocated to you.
While there are no fundamental problems with JIRA, I'm unsure that I will be working myself very closely with users of Atlassian Confluence. The client base I am concerned with tend to be more integrated with Amazon, IBM BlueMix / Watson, open source LAMP/PHP (WordPress, MediaWiki) & those that rely on more proprietary CMS would tend to use Sharepoint not Confluence. JIRA seems to me to stand or fall with the rest of the Atlassian silo or suite, as it is not closely integrated with Sharepoint or mediawiki based reporting or knowledge management. Data interchange standards in this area are weak so Microsoft, open source LAMP projects using Phabricator, and Atlassian JIRA seem to be three distinct silos, with Amazon, Google & IBM offering their own tools for similar needs.
JIRA Software is a pretty complex tool. We have a project manager for JIRA who onboarded us, created our board, and taught us the basics. I think it would have been pretty overwhelming to learn without her. JIRA offers so much functionality that I'm not aware of -- I constantly need to Google or ask others about existing features. Also, although they are all under the Atlassian umbrella, I find it difficult to switch between JIRA Software and Confluence.
Our JIRA support is handled internally by members of our Product Support team. It is not supported by a 3rd party. Our internal support will always sent out notifications for downtime which is usually done on the weekend unless it is required to fix a bug/issue that is affecting the entire company. Downtime is typically 3-4 hours and then once the maintenance is complete, another broadcast email is sent out informing the user community that the system is now available for use.
One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.
Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.
Decide how to breakdown your ongoing jobs - are they monthly recurring or annual broken into chunks? What are you going to give clients i.e. how will your proposals and invoices look?
Jira Software has more integrations and has more features than many of its competitors. While some of its competitors do have better UI/UX than Jira Software, they have improved this greatly over time. Atlassian also acquired Trello years ago, so that adds better user interfaces to the system. They do also offer a pretty in-depth library of how to customize the platform that others don't.
WorkflowMax is much much easier than Streamtime, much more affordable and easier to try out and see if it meets your needs. Streamtime is a great comprehensive product but we lost a year's subscription in investment because we couldn't get answers to the support questions we needed and they had a no refund policy!
Max enables Loan Assistant to invoice very quickly and easily and integration with Xero for card payments brings our cashflow forward.
Max enables the Loan Assistant team to manage their workflow in an efficient and productive way. The team all work from home. It is the centre of our Loan Assistant universe.
