The Best of Both Worlds: Jira and OpenAir PSA

By Jim Schein

Jira is an incredibly popular tool with technology teams, with more than 65,000 businesses that rely on its features for agile task management, issue management, and reporting. As a beloved solution by many technology teams, it’s no surprise that few developers want to migrate from using it to a tool that supports more business-centric functions, such as NetSuite OpenAir.

However, for those businesses that have adopted OpenAir, getting some of the information into the Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool is essential for resource management, accurate billing, and forecasting, among other needs.

How can a business that is using both Jira and OpenAir reconcile the rich and valuable information locked away in Jira with the powerful resource and projection tools available in OpenAir? OpenAir Integration scripts may be your answer.

The Challenge

With Jira’s widespread usage, many professional services organizations see themselves dealing with the same problem – how to get the time and billing data out of the agile methodology tool and into OpenAir.

Developers are unwilling to migrate entirely over to OpenAir because Jira’s features – like Scrum boards and deployment status information – are essential for their work. At the same time, project teams and leaders need a view of where technical teams are spending their time and the health of a project to manage resources, plan projects, and forecast hiring needs, billing data, and project loads.

For many businesses, solving this challenge becomes a manual task. Some companies have project leaders and managers transfer information manually from a Jira data dump that can require error-prone manual manipulation. Others require developers to enter their time twice – once into Jira and a second time into OpenAir – forcing these valuable resources to spend time on operational tasks and not billable work. Or, in the worst cases, businesses don’t pull usage information out of Jira and lose out on billing hours that could contribute to the company’s bottom line.

The Solution

Instead of using a process that can result in data errors, suck time away from productive work, frustrate resources, and cause lost revenue, connecting these two systems together just makes sense.

Top Step has solved this problem with an OpenAir integration script for many clients. This script has been successfully implemented with both local server and cloud-hosted versions of Jira. The cloud-hosted version has more flexibility and more options. However, the local server version can also be successfully integrated with some additional security configurations.

A script provides a professional service organization with options for bringing over data from Jira. Task and user setup must be configured, resulting in accurate and clear information for reporting and forecasting within OpenAir. Usage of the OpenAir system can be flexible as well, with data shared from Jira utilizing one of several low-cost OpenAir user model options.

Setting up the OpenAir-Jira script is relatively easy and can take as little as two to three weeks to have the solution up and running. In addition, there are no other additional licenses needed; for example, an OpenAir API key is not required to run the script.

The Results

Once developed and configured for a business’s unique task needs and user tracking requirements, the OpenAir-Jira script can save a company both time and money. Developers don’t need to duplicate their time entries, and project leaders don’t need to spend hours manipulating and transferring data from one system to another.

With the integration script running regularly, business teams will have accurate and timely information about projects and resource utilization, increasing the accuracy of reporting and streamlining resource planning. Project, resource, and revenue forecasting can be done natively within OpenAir utilizing data from Jira, creating an all-in-one solution that supports business operations and growth.

Are you looking for a solution that can bring together your Jira data with your OpenAir PSA tool? Top Step’s OpenAir-Jira integration script could be exactly what you need. Contact us today to speak to some of our customers who use the Jira script with their OpenAir implementation and get information on how we can help you reduce data errors and increase productivity while maintaining your current agile platform tools.