For the last 5 years, I’ve been pushing the boundaries of what we can accomplishment as a team of developers.  We’re continually improving the project management system with the intention of truly supporting the evolving business needs of our host company.

We’re just a small team, and at the end of the day we’re an accessory to a construction project management business.  As a small/medium business, we’re constantly adapting enterprise-level technology practices to fit our growing business. It makes sense to emulate the big dogs – but you have to be able to execute with less resources.  Less money, less people, less focus. 

To manage development with minimal resources, we focus on the most unorganized parts of development – the people.

Utilizing Atlassian’s Jira Services Desk, we can accept tickets/issues from any of our employees and leverage an extensive tracking workflow with those issues.  The primary attributes that benefit us are:

• Fix version. Grouping the issues by the intended timeline for implementation.
• Component. Grouping the issues by the architectural pieces of our software that they involve.  Great for breaking work out for individuals to focus on a specific feature set for a period of time.
• Epic Link. When we are able to have leadership buy-in on a development project, we can plan the scope of an entire project.  Each task is set up as an issue, linked to a master Epic.
• Estimated Time to Complete. When making and keeping commitments