Jira Resource Management: How to Plan, Allocate & Track Resources

Have you been using Jira throughout your company, but now realize that your business needs have changed, and its functions are not enough? 

Let’s say, your company has expanded, and now you have to manage your globally distributed resources. Or your projects are accompanied by numerous risks and uncertainties, and you’d like to make your decision-making process more informed. 

Although Jira has powerful task management and team collaboration functionality, there are neither resource management features nor prediction capabilities so far. These opportunities are available for Epicflow users, and the good news is that our system integrates with popular project and resource management tools, including Jira. This integration can become a helpful solution, as it will complement the tool you’re using with Epicflow’s advanced functions to fully meet your extended business needs.

Read further to find out how that works.

Key takeaways:

• Jira is a great project management tool, but can be insufficient for resource management.
• Resource management is crucial for companies operating in multi-project environments with limited resources.
• Jira requires supplementation with plugins or integration with specialized resource management tools to receive the full range of resource management capabilities.

Can Jira Be Used for Resource Management?

Jira is a well regarded issue-tracking tool, and it can be used for resource management, albeit in reduced capacity. The base Jira software can provide some resource tracking opportunities. Jira Advanced Roadmaps and Jira Align can offer capacity planning features, although each comes with its own downsides.

But ultimately, for many resource management use cases, Jira either lacks required functionality  or offers solutions that are impractical for smaller organizations. It can be used effectively for time and issue tracking, but might not provide as many opportunities for workload balancing, competence management, or predictive analytics.

To achieve success in multi-project environments with complex and interconnected resource dynamics, one might need to supplement Jira with plugins from the Atlassian marketplace or integrate specialized multi-project resource management tools with Jira to get access to advanced features.

Below, we’ll explore native resource management capabilities and limitations of Jira in more detail.

Native Resource Management Capabilities in Jira

Jira is a great project management tool, but the number of native resource management capabilities in the software might not be enough for managing multi-project environments. 

Base Jira Software

The basic version of Jira provides some resource tracking capabilities but it’s far from being a comprehensive resource management solution. With the basic version, you can:

• Store resource-related project data.
• Log time spent on tasks.
• Set capacity limits.
• Build workload dashboards.

Using custom fields in project planning and custom widgets in dashboards allows users to create a basic resource tracking system, but there are little to none analytical depths available.

Jira Advanced Roadmaps

Advanced Roadmaps, the Jira extension available in the premium plan, provides significantly more native features related to resource management. With this tool, you can:

• Create a consolidated cross-project tracking dashboard.
• Track resource utilization via storypoints.
• Use scenario planning capabilities to improve planning.

This set of features is a good fit for small teams, but still lacks advanced functionality. 

Jira Align

Jira Align is a separate product in the Jira ecosystem, and one that provides the most advanced functionality for enterprise resource planning. WIth Jira Align, you can:

• Set up high-level progress visualization across programs and portfolios.
• Track dependencies between teams and workstreams.
• Forecast demand and capacity at the team and organizational level.

That said, this tool is a big investment and might not be affordable to small and mid-sized businesses and require significant effort in implementation. It’s not fit to be a scalable resource management solution.

Limitations of Jira for Resource Management

When it comes to resource management, Jira has a few limitations that are critical for resource-constrained multi-project environments. Here are the most important ones.

• Lack of cross-project visibility. Jira doesn’t provide a consolidated view of all projects, which can reduce the ability to find bottlenecks.
• Lack of leave tracking. Team capacity planning is influenced by the workload, time off, and public holidays. Jira doesn’t account for the last two, which leads to incorrect scheduling and unexpected delays.
• Lack of predictive analytics. Jira’s native features cannot assist in analyzing future workload, which might prevent accurate long-term resource planning.
• Lack of resource leveling features. Jira’s capabilities don’t include workload analytics and workload leveling.
• Lack of skill-based allocation. Jira treats all resources the same, not as people with different skill levels, which might result in inaccurate allocation decisions.
• Lack of budget management. Jira doesn’t account for resource use cost, which leads to inaccurate financial planning.

Overcoming most of these Jira limitations comes down to using third-party plugins or tools.

Benefits of Enhancing Jira with Resource Management Plugin or Software

Since Jira doesn’t provide full access to resource management features, seeing effective results requires either implementing a plugin from the Atlassian marketplace or integrating Jira with a specialized resource management tool. Here are a few benefits of doing that.

• Resource utilization optimization. Resource performance analytics allows for improved resource utilization, preventing both overload and underload, optimizing resource cost.
• Improved performance. This results in better resource performance thanks to manageable load and reduces risk of revenue loss caused by underloading resources.
• Bottleneck prevention. Load analysis enables identification of overloaded resources that are causing a bottleneck and provides the tools for resolving the issues.
• Better planning. Predictive analytics improves insight into current team capacity and allows for planning future projects to prevent project conflicts and improve throughput.
• Financial performance tracking. Comparing the real time usage to projected one facilitates tracking project margins and financial forecasting.
• AI-based portfolio optimization. The best resource management tools offer AI-based features that provide resource optimization solutions across multiple projects automatically, improving resource utilization without hours of analytical work.

The possible downsides of using a third-party tool with Jira are the need to ensure stakeholder buy-in to invest in another software and the learning curve that some tools may come with..

Choosing a resource management tool for Jira

Depending on your budget and needs for depth of analytics, you can go for a plugin or for a third-party resource management software for multi-project environments like Epicflow. Here is a quick comparison between the two.

	Jira plugin	Resource management tool
Cost	More affordable	More expensive
Ease of use	Easier to set up and use	Has a learning curve
Analytical features	Leaning to basic	Leaning to advanced
Additional features	Little to none	Some have AI-based insights
Scalability	Low to medium	Can be used in multi-project environments
Best for	Beginners and companies with a small number of projects	Complex multi-project environments

How to Manage Resources in Jira with a Plugin or a Tool

Now that you have a little bit more context about Jira’s usefulness in resource management, let’s take a quick look at how to use Jira and other tools to improve resource performance at your company.

Prior resource management considerations

Advanced resource management processes require third-party tools, and you need to make sure data from Jira is correct to ensure high quality analytics. Here are the steps to doing that.

• Create project assessment workflows. A large part of resource analytics is comparing actual performance to expected performance. If the assessments of how much time it takes to complete a project are off, you’ll have skewed load analysis results.
• Create a uniform system for time tracking. Reporting on time spent on tasks in a uniform fashion provides accurate data for reporting and analytics.
• Consolidate project data. In multi-project environments executed by the same pool of resources, projects compete for company time. Having the full picture of all projects you run lets you understand those interdependencies.
• Define business goals and budget. Before starting to look for a tool for resource management, you need to understand the larger business goals and the budget considerations.

Connecting the tools

With all data in order, you can proceed to connect Jira to your tool of choice. Plugins from the Atlassian marketplace will be integrated automatically. If you have chosen a dedicated tool, it might be more difficult.

Some resource management tools like Epicflow have a native integration with Jira, which allows users to simply connect their Jira instance and import all the data automatically. Some others might require setting up integration via API.

Resource planning

To do resource planning in Jira, the resource management tool will require data on:

• How much time does the team have in total.
• How much time is left after accounting for planned project execution and time off.
• How much time a new project is expected to take to finish.

Analyzing this data with a plugin or a resource management tool lets the user understand and visualize the capacity their company operates. This analysis is done by comparing total capacity and the sum of work hours already allocated. It facilitates planning project schedules, project intake, and making resource allocation decisions.

Read more: What Is Resource Planning? Definition, Importance & How to Do It

Managing resource allocation in Jira

To make Jira resource allocation decisions, the following factors need to be present:

• The chosen resources have enough time for the project or task.
• The chosen resources have the right skill level.
• The chosen project timeframe does not conflict with other projects.

Allocate resources manually to projects and tasks that provide the possibility of moving the progress further given the current constraints, or use automatic allocation features if your tool allows that.

When that’s done, assign the resources to projects and tasks either in Jira or in the resource management tool of choice if it supports data import to Jira.

Read more: 4 Tips on Efficient Resource Allocation in a Multi-Project Environment

Advanced resource management techniques

Some features unavailable in plugins but present in resource management tools allow users to perform advanced practices. These typically include:

• Predictive analytics. Early detection of  potential resource overload to take proactive action before it compromises the portfolio.
• What-if analysis. Experimenting with different scenarios like project staggering and resource allocation decisions in a simulated environment to optimize resource utilization.
• Automatic resource balancing. Letting AI-based optimization algorithms sequence projects and allocate resources with the goal of maximizing business value per constrained hour.

Read more: Value-Based Portfolio Management Explained: How to Maximize Business Value with Available Resources

How to monitor resource performance in Jira

Monitoring resource performance enables you to catch bottlenecks early on and resolve them before they have a chance to impact overall portfolio performance negatively. Typically, you’ll have to monitor the following:

• Resource utilization rate. How much capacity is used at each point in time.
• Budget variance. How the expected resource cost relates to real spending on the project.
• Planned vs used time. How the expected amount of time relates to time actually used for doing work.
• Billable hour utilization. How much of employee time is spent on projects vs administrative tasks.

Some tools will automatically highlight resource groups that are overloaded to speed up detecting them and resolving the overload.

Read more: 10 PMO KPIs: Essential Metrics to Drive Project Portfolio Performance

Why Do Advanced Jira Resource Management with Epicflow

What is special about Epicflow is its powerful resource management functions, predictive capabilities, automatic task prioritization, and project portfolio management functionality. Jira alone cannot provide the capabilities needed for advanced enterprise-level resource management.

Here is a list of features Epicflow can add to companies that work in a Jira environment.

Epicflow Resource Management Feature	How It Benefits Resource Management
Historical and future load graphs.	Analyze past trends and anticipate future capacity issues for better long-term planning.
Finite capacity planning.	Create realistic execution plans based on actual resource availability rather than ideal assumptions.
Capacity forecasting and bottleneck prediction.	Predict future overloads and constraint risks early, allowing proactive resource adjustments.
Bottleneck identification and management.	Identify critical resource groups limiting portfolio throughput to focus optimization efforts where they impact the bottom line.
AI-based portfolio optimization.	Automatically optimize project sequencing and resource allocation according to priorities and constraints.
Dynamic task prioritization based on resource constraints.	Ensure resources always focus on the most important executable work, reducing delays and optimizing resource cost.
Prediction of delivery dates under finite capacity.	Improve delivery predictability by forecasting realistic completion timelines based on constrained resources.
Competence and skill-based resource allocation.	Match tasks with the most suitable resources based on skills, availability, and competence levels.
Flow-based resource optimization across the entire portfolio	Improve throughput and delivery speed by optimizing execution flow rather than individual project schedules.

Jira integration is native in Epicflow and management can create an automatic data integration of exactly the projects they need by connecting the company Jira profile. Upon the integration, all the data created in Jira will be available in Epicflow, without the need to recreate anything.

But most importantly, team members can continue working in Jira, their familiar environment, while the management can use Epicflow to gain insights into performance of project portfolio and resources and timely adjust the situation if required.   

Watch the video to gain more insights into the benefits of integrating Jira with Epicflow illustrated by real-life use cases:Jira and Jira Align Integration with Epicflow Portfolio & Resource Management

Book a call with our experts to learn more about how Epicflow can help your organization in resource management.

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