I am managing a medium-sized team (15-20 people) who are geographically dispersed. Our team works in privacy, security, data governance, and compliance, but we DO NOT develop software. So, our choices boil down to Jira, Azure DevOps Boards, and Asana.
We are looking for a tool that:
- Is user-friendly for non-technicians and easy for us to self-administer.
- Permits us to automate common workflows.
- Allows us to classify work across multiple dimensions.
- Permits cross-functional visibility across work teams to identify potential points of collaboration and historical work projects.
- Enables management visibility to see where we may be overtaxed or under-resourced or whether the time is spent on the right priorities.
- Enables engagement/task assignments to people who are not necessarily on our team (i.e., I need someone in HR to do "X") - preferably without their needing to be fully licensed.
- Makes it easier for everyone to understand how their work connects to the broader team's big-picture goals.
- Enables easy integration with other common workplace tools.
Thanks for any guidance you can provide.
This is what I know:
1 - User Friendly is relative to what background you are coming from. I am not familiar with Azure. It sounds like you may be the Project Manager. I have used both Jira and Asana. I think Jira feels and looks more simple. Jira is more Project and software-dev oriented. Asana is more general, not to say it isn't designed to handle a development project. I think your decision is going to come down to: *Who is currently using what? *How is it going to be to get the individual outliers to adopt a new management style? Some will adapt and some will refuse. 2 - I believe they all have a level of automation 3 - I know Asana will let you tag and prioritize. Jira will allow you to prioritize, tag, make teams, and separate the projects by teams if you like. 4 - Again you can create teams and you can control the team visibility to projects. 5 - I know Jira will allow you to create a human resource with a burndown. 6 - Jira can assign tasks, projects, etc. to individual team members. 7 - With Jira comes Confluence. Here you can keep lots of support documentation. They have lots of templates that can be used as well. 8 - Jira does allow a lot of integration. It is designed for Product and Project management of HR and Software. If software devs didn't see a robust integration feature they would be very disappointed.
JIRA is the clear choice for you based on your use case. JIRA has been around for more than 15 years and they defintly are pioneer in this field. JIRA will perfectly match up with your use cases (data governance compliance, etc.). JIRA can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. You can choose one of the starter templates or build a custom transition with a dedicated workflow for each. If done correctly, even though the first step takes time, it makes life much easier for everyone in the end. I don't work for JIRA just a big fan!
