Staying within budget means tracking your team’s time and resource utilization, so you need to be able to connect time with tasks. While JIRA is fine for managing tickets, it doesn’t work as well for managing client projects. As a project manager, you need to make sure your projects are profitable - and that means being able to track developers’ time and utilization rates. Your developers, on the other hand, want to work in JIRA - it’s agile and built for their workflows with tickets, comments, and code reviews, which is why it’s the most popular software for developers to manage their work. Unfortunately, this agile first approach - with its moving priorities and lack of awareness around clients or financials, is pretty bad when it comes to managing client work.

The tension between the people managing the projects and the developers working on them has been a tiresome reality - until now. Today we’re excited to launch our new and improved JIRA integration to solve this problem.

Listen to Paul Weinert, owner at Graybox, a web design and development agency, explain why he's already excited about it and how Accelo's integration with JIRA combines the best of agile and waterfall project management!

Knowledge: Know how profitable your projects are today, and forecast for tomorrow

A scenario you might’ve found yourself in before:

"It's hard for me to manage my projects and developers because there's no way to automatically track the time they spend in JIRA in Accelo, so knowing actual utilization and who to give more or less work to is difficult"

Paul Weinert from Graybox hits the nail on the head:

"We have the development team working in JIRA, which is great, but it's very agile-based project management - and that doesn't necessarily work in the professional services world because we commit to doing a thing by a date, for a certain amount of money.

Now you can accurately track and forecast profitability across your software development projects and make better decisions around your team’s utilization rate in real time - without asking your developers to ever leave JIRA. Accelo's new and improved JIRA integration lets you easily timesheet across your entire business by automatically capturing the time developers spend in JIRA and reflecting it in Accelo, with all of the worklogs, comments, projects, milestones, and contracts. Know which developers are available to work on what and how much of their time has been spent against the project. Now, when developers work in JIRA, it'll automatically carve out time from the Milestone in Accelo because all their work will automatically flow through into Accelo . 

Those who were a part of our beta are already loving it too: 

"Very pleased with this add-on - it has expanded our use of Accelo so that we are now able to use Accelo as our client facing task manager, with JIRA to manage the rest of our work. The time logs are pulling through perfectly. Really happy with it." - Tanya Fraser, Online Visions

Reliability: Reduce the back and forth and uncertainty between tools

A common feeling among developers in the past:

"I want to be able to do all of my work in JIRA and not have to log time separately in Accelo, it disrupts my workflow and what I really care about is crushing tickets, solving problems, and knowing what I need to work on next"

Get the reliability you need to accurately forecast without nagging the developers on your team to log their time separately. With this update, project managers can be confident the work they see as outstanding is the real deal (and not an instance where someone forgot to log an activity). Now, all the work that’s done in JIRA will flow to Accelo automatically. For developers, this means being able to log time against Accelo Projects, Milestones, Tickets, and Retainers without leaving JIRA.

Another thing we thought about when building this upgraded integration: developers should be able to choose where the issues they create go, without leaving JIRA. Now, when developers create an issue, they can decide where it goes (so that they don't need to adjust things separately in Accelo). Our new Chrome extension allows developers to search in JIRA and not have to log work or time into Accelo separately.

Listen to Paul give a rundown of exactly how this integration works and why he and his team love it!

 Other clients from the beta have already expressed how it's streamlined their operations:

"Using JIRA for our software team paired with Accelo for project management has really streamlined our operations. The add-on does a great job of syncing worklogs over to Accelo." - Levi Pruss, Y-Zag

Ease: A more seamless experience, for everyone

Here are some examples of how you can accomplish more with Accelo’s new JIRA integration:

The biggest change with this upgrade is how Accelo syncs with JIRA: instead of syncing an Accelo Issue, this integration will now sync Accelo Tasks. This means JIRA can now sync with Projects, Milestones and Retainers in addition to Tickets! 

If you’re a project manager, you get: Confidence & Empowerment

• You’re always kept in the loop - all activities in Accelo will be synced with JIRA comments or work logs, so anything developers work on will appear in the respective Accelo Project, Milestone, Ticket, or Retainer within minutes.
• Your developers will see the full picture - any activity created in Accelo, including those by clients or other Accelo users who don’t have JIRA accounts, will be created as comments or work logs in JIRA.
• Ensuring projects stay within scope - you won’t have to nag developers to log their project time separately in Accelo.

If you’re a developer, you get: Freedom

• Stop worrying about logging time separately - this happens automatically
• You can really focus on the issues you’re solving - spend your time in JIRA and working on code, the rest handles itself.
• Easily link to projects inside Accelo - with our new Chrome Extension, if you’re creating or editing a JIRA ticket, you’ll be able to quickly search for the client project, milestone, ticket, or retainer that already lives in Accelo right from JIRA! When you save the issue, the integration will automatically create the matching task in Accelo.

"We really need and enjoy the integration between our development group in JIRA and our business group in Accelo" - Kelly Seale, Bluematrix Tech

This new and improved integration will empower project managers with the knowledge and visibility they need across their projects to make decisions about utilization, forecasting, and invoicing with confidence while giving developers the freedom to live and do all of their work in JIRA knowing their time is accounted for automatically.

To learn more, check out our Help Guides or email our Support team.