Managing 200 PMs and 300 housing projects in Jira with Structure PPM

As CEO of Demicon Austria, a company known for providing comprehensive IT solutions, Tina Myerscough knows all about the top tools on the market for complex projects.

So it’s no surprise that they choose Structure PPM to help them organize their work. Most notably, with handling over 300 housing projects in Vienna. 

Myerscough said,

“Structure and Gantt Charts for Structure helped us to get a very clear overview of our building projects. It created milestones and helped us to report on them in a Jira environment.”

Demicon Austria finds opportunities for digital transformation for companies all throughout the nation. Since 2008, they have helped companies future proof their operations and their people-first approach has led to hundreds of organizations choosing them as their IT solutions partner.

However, when it came to having a customer with projects of the size and scale of Vienna, they had to bring their most powerful tools to the challenge. Myerscough was handling a 500-user data center with over 200 project managers handling 300 projects. 

That is a considerable amount of users and different plates all spinning up in the air that need to be tracked and controlled. 

Major tools for major projects

The team at Demicon first reached out and began testing Tempo’s tools at the annual Atlassian Team event, where they outlined the issues they were having with such a complicated project load.

That is where they found Structure and its companion tool Gantt Charts for Structure and felt it would be perfect for their complex project needs. So how did Myerscough and the team put Structure to use?

“One of the key challenges we had was the amount of milestones that had to interact with each other. However – with Structure – one of the key elements we used is that we can now see 15-20 regulated milestones for our 300 projects in a single overview.

“One overview for all those milestones, the timing and status of them as well. This was only possible with Structure and Gantt Charts for Structure. Other tools don’t give you that overview nor the possibility to drill down into the specifics.”

She added that the level of transparency and clearness was something just not possible with other tools. 

Finding the right solution

Structure PPM allows you to visualize multiple projects, programs, and portfolios in a single view. It creates a cleaner, more trackable Jira for your entire team with unlimited options to manage and track issues.

It also combines with Gantt Charts for Structure, which generates agile Gantt charts from your Structure data – allowing  simple and speedy reporting and advanced visualizations.

Tempo’s tools are designed to be modular and flexible. That means they can drop right into your Jira workflows and start working without a major overhaul of your teams’ existing methods. The less effort your team needs to do to understand how to use your tools, the more likely they will be to actually use it.

Myerscough said,

“When using Structure and Tempo, I can honestly say that it is easy to configure. With the support you get, you very quickly get an output that is viable. There is also a lot of training material available because Tempo and Structure can do so much more.”

Structure’s simplicity and intuitive tooling doesn’t mean that Structure lacks power. 

Myerscough added, “Then, once you empower yourself to use the finest configurations, you find it is such a good toolset to have at your disposal for so many use cases. It empowers us to do amazing things.”

A structured approach to project management

Today, Myerscough and the team have unprecedented oversight and understanding over the 300+ housing projects ongoing in Vienna.

Myerscough said, “When we implemented Structure and milestones, we could see all the relevant things a project manager needs. We had the reporting to see if a milestone was reached, delayed, or in conflict with something else.

“From there, it gets aggregated into another view so that the building manager can see the status for every single thing combined. It wasn’t just that we could see two or three more projects – but all 300 of them in a single Gantt chart.”

If you want to see more of what Structure can do, or how exactly it could help your teams, you can get a free trial to drop right into your Jira instance. You can read all about Structure’s features and start your free trial over on Structure’s Atlassian marketplace page.