Hello! I’m looking for a JIRA plugin that can give us a reliable view for tracking resources and forecasting availability on different time frames such as daily, weekly, or monthly. This is especially important since our resources often contribute to multiple projects.
Here’s what we need:
- A list of current tasks with their durations and effort periods
- Information on upcoming tasks including their duration and effort
- Real-time availability for new task assignments based on current and planned work
- The ability to identify conflicts, overallocation, or prioritization issues quickly
- A feature that lets team members update their task progress
- Options for managers to create reports
We have around 100+ people working in 5 locations worldwide, each managed by different team leaders who handle multiple projects. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Skip the JIRA plugins entirely. They’re always limited and create more headaches than they solve.
I’ve dealt with resource tracking across multiple projects and teams. Most JIRA addons are still stuck within JIRA’s constraints and just add maintenance overhead.
What worked for us? Pull all the data out of JIRA automatically and build a real resource dashboard. Set up automation to extract tasks, durations, assignments, and progress updates from JIRA in real time. Push that into something that actually handles resource planning.
Your 100+ people keep using JIRA normally - no new interfaces to learn. But managers get clean reports and automatic conflict detection.
Automate everything: capacity forecasts, overallocation alerts, management reports. No more manual spreadsheets or sluggish plugins.
This scales way better than any plugin, especially with multiple locations and team leads. You’re not stuck with whatever limitations the plugin devs chose.
Check out how to build this automation at https://latenode.com
We rolled out Portfolio for Jira about two years ago for a similar setup - around 80 people spread across different locations. The resource management features are solid for what you’re looking for. It handles cross-project allocation well and gives you the visibility for forecasting. The timeline view shows capacity planning at different intervals, which helped us spot bottlenecks before they hit. Just heads up - it needs decent setup time to configure properly for multiple teams and projects. Reporting’s okay, but we still export to Excel sometimes for deeper analysis. User adoption’s crucial though - if people don’t update their progress regularly, forecasting gets unreliable fast. Overall it fixed most of our resource tracking headaches, but expect a learning curve for admins.
bigpicture is solid for what you need! we used it for a year, and it handles resource allocation between projects pretty well. the gantt chart helps identify conflicts quickly. team leads adapt fast since the interface is pretty intuitive. just a heads up though, reporting isn’t great and sync issues pop up with larger teams.
Tempo Planner’s worth a look. We rolled it out last year when we couldn’t track resources across six project streams. The capacity planning handles multi-project scenarios well and the forecasting works great. What I love is the real-time workload tracking - you can instantly spot who’s swamped without digging through individual boards. It plugs into standard Jira workflows, so your team updates progress like they normally do instead of learning new software. Reporting generates solid management dashboards, though customization’s pretty limited. Heads up - it gets sluggish with big datasets, so you’ll probably need to tweak your setup for 100+ people. Pricing scales per user, so factor that into your budget.