As 2017 came to a close our team at Ascend Integrated asked ourselves a simple question: How does the Jira ecosystem exist within a small team? As many project management solutions have gone all-in on Enterprise solutions, Atlassian has maintained that Jira is prime for small teams while also possessing supreme scalability through the SAFe methodology within Jira. In this blog, we’ll explore how small teams can utilize Jira to its fullest extent.
Price
One of the most important features that make Jira small-team-friendly is cost. As many agile teams look to transition from the sticky-note on the whiteboard phase over to a project management tool, cost becomes a major factor. The cost for the cloud instance of Jira for 1-10 users is only $10 per month. Plus, adding users is quite easy and will cost you an additional $7 per user up to 100 users. As your team grows, your cost per user actually decreases. We would also recommend you go with annual pricing if you know that you will be using Jira for the foreseeable future.
Flexibility
Agile teams need the ability to work with speed, cohesiveness, and autonomy within the context of a single platform. Jumping between different project management tools wastes time and can cause confusion between departments. With Jira as your central hub, you have the ability to connect to products like Confluence and BitBucket. Jira’s seamless integration with these tools will allow your team to store development documentation, decompose team silos through open communication, and track development issues throughout the development lifecycle. Working with project managers, back-end engineers, and designers has never been easier thanks to these integrations.
Functionality
We’ve discussed price and flexibility, including two great integrations with Confluence and Bitbucket, but how does Jira itself standout from a user perspective? Jira’s custom workflows, JQL functionality, and personalized Kanban and SCRUM boards allow for members from all teams and skill levels to utilize Jira in a way that best suits their team while simultaneously tying back to the same projects. The beauty of Jira is that you can make it as simple or complex as your team needs, meaning once you of understanding vast amounts of customization at your disposal, you have complete autonomy over your workflows, visualizations, and tracking initiatives.
The Case for Collaboration
Jira certainly isn’t the only project management tool with flexibility and scaling ability, however, it is the best tool currently available with added documentation and repository integrations and some serious out-of-the-box usability for a small-team budget. If your team is looking for a low-risk project management solution to start off the new year, then we strongly suggest giving Jira a try!