(Not) The Final Frontier. How BigPicture becomes more intuitive and user-friendly
The latest version of our products, BigPicture 8.3 and BigGantt 8.3, has just emerged. This version puts even more emphasis on usability and Portfolio Management aspects to make them more powerful.
Better User Experience
BigPicture 8.3 directly addresses the themes of user experience and intuitive navigation in different ways and aspects. We introduced additional capacity allocation units, such as hours, man-days, percentages, and heatmap. The effort mode visualization can be presented from the perspective of original estimates, the remaining estimates, or via Story Points. These changes allow you to follow your team’s workload and have a better understanding of the program’s progress.
New Role and export capabilities
BigPicture 8.3 introduces a brand new role: Global Resource Admin. Now you can assign this role to a person whose sole purpose is managing resources without the ability to manage other aspects of the projects. Consequently, a Global Resource Admin can manage days off and other things associated with resource availability without any risk that they would, by accident, edit some other project or program settings.
BigPicture 8.3 expands your export capabilities to Excel. From now on, you can easily export Resources Module to Excel with the help of BigTemplate. The output spreadsheet will respect aggregation settings defined in your BigPicture view.
Alongside the export feature, we added in-line task editing details in the Resources Module. Additionally, you can edit Jira task details directly within the Resources module without the need to leave the BigPicture app.
Clear view of your boards
BigPicture users often tend to have so many dependencies in their Board module it can be quite difficult to tell what’s connected with what and how. With BigPicture 8.3, you can collapse all dependencies and see how every single task is connected with others using the dependency counter. With this feature, you can now have a clear, neat view of the board even if the network of dependencies is quite complex. It also deepens the connection with Jira, as Board dependencies can now be based on several link types from it. And if you want to use your Jira’s Quick Filters in BigPicture, you can just directly copy them to the app.
Improved Gantt Module
BigPicture’s Gantt module and our roadmapping app BigGantt got a huge boost in the 8.3 version. Firstly, we added new methods of grouping and creating dependencies. The new methods allow BigGantt users to collapse all the task groups, sort collapsed tasks and manage dependencies between them for better visibility. Visibility is also improved with new display indicators, e.g. Estimates or Jira dropdown fields in the columns of your Gantt WBS panel. And in case you need to share a specific BigGantt view, we also added shareable views and links. Just generate one and send it to the interested parties. Everyone will have the same view.
Advanced Portfolio Management
Both BigGantt and BigPicture gained a huge boost for Portfolio Management, with a special emphasis on a financial level of your projects and initiatives. First and foremost, you can now add and fill in manually columns that describe budget, estimated and actual cost, and assign value to projects and items within them. All those estimates can be easily aggregated at the initiative or portfolio level.
Need more metrics and filters? BigPicture 8.3 allows you to customize portfolio-view columns in the Overview module, so any changes and indicators are within hands’ reach. And just like we improved Gadgets, so you can use them with Jira’s Quick Filters, we also added a feature that allows you to present data from Gantt, Calendar, and Risks modules with the use of Jira and Confluence gadgets. These can be filtered using both regular and Quick Filters so you have full control of what’s presented in your gadgets.
The latest version of the BigPicture suite explores the possibilities to create even more intuitive apps, designed to properly respond to many different needs and ideas of our users. As the title stated, it’s not our last word (or Final Frontier). With every new version, we will strive to create the best possible user experience with no compromises over our other features.
