Introducing slice-based configurations for Gantt Charts for Structure PPM

Originally published December 11, 2018

Chances are your company has several Jira projects going on at any given time, and each project team may have unique ways of handling tasks, managing time, assigning resources, etc. This is fine, on a project-to-project basis. But what happens when you want to view all those projects together, in a single Gantt chart? Suddenly, all those small differences don’t play well together — or, at least, they never used to.

Gantt Charts for Structure PPM slice-based configurations change all that, by allowing you to create custom rules for specific sets of issues. So, if Project A uses different link types than Project B, that’s no problem. Or if Team A tracks progress differently from Team B, just add a unique configuration slice for each, and Gantt Charts for Structure will handle the rest.

Override existing configuration rules

Configuration slices enable you to override the overarching Gantt chart configuration for select issues. You can set unique configurations for work estimates, progress calculations, manual scheduling, dependency and link types, resource assignment, and task settings. You can create as many configuration slices for these as you need – so if some teams use manual scheduling, while others use automated scheduling, that’s perfectly fine. If some projects assign tasks to specific individuals, while others assign them to entire teams, no problem! If different parts of your company use different link types for dependencies, Gantt Charts will put them all together.

Customize to your heart’s content. Just keep in mind that the behavior and appearance of each issue can only be configured by a single slice, and slices are run from top to bottom. So if your first slice sets up manual scheduling for all issues in Project A, while your second slice turns off manual scheduling for Epics, Epics from Project A will still be manually scheduled. If you want them automatically scheduled, you would need to reorder your slices.

Add some color

We’ve received lots of requests from users who want to assign unique colors to different projects, color-code their charts by assignee, or who firmly believe Epics should always be purple (for example). That all sounded great to us – so we made it happen. Now you can set a unique color for each slice. Go ahead and set unique colors for each project, make Epics purple, or just add a splash of color for the fun of it!

Or, if you want to, you can stick with the default colors. We won’t judge.

Omit issues

One of the most useful features of slice-based configurations is the ability to completely remove issues from your Gantt chart. There are several reasons you may want to remove issues. Perhaps you want to remove data from a specific project or team. Or maybe you want to declutter your chart by removing small sub-tasks that don’t impact your schedule. Whatever the reason, simply create a new configuration slice and change its configuration to “Do Not Show.” The selected issues will be omitted from your Gantt chart and will have no impact on your timeline.

A few other exciting changes

We’re obviously pretty excited about the new feature, but there are some other big changes in Gantt Charts for Structure PPM 1.3 worth noting:

• Multiple link types – Gantt Charts for Structure now supports multiple link types per dependency type. So if some teams use “Blocks” while others prefer “Depends On” link types, they can play nicely together now!

• Filter by resource – You can now filter your structure and Gantt chart by a specific resource, making it easier than ever to visualize workloads, resolve conflicts, and avoid overloading a particular resource.

• Copy configurations – Creating new configurations just got a lot easier. Now you can start with an existing configuration, copy it, and customize it for a specific need – without losing the original configuration.

We packed more enhancements into this release (check them all out in our Release Notes), but you’re probably eager to check it out for yourself Try Gantt Charts for Structure PPM today.

A few final notes

Gantt Charts for Structure PPM 1.3 and above requires version 5.1 of Structure for Jira, and we recently addressed a few customer-reported issues in Structure.Gantt 1.3.1.

Gantt Charts 1.3 and above and Structure 5.0 and above remain Data Center approved.