Understanding JIRA, Trello, and Asana

Project Management is the act of planning, organizing, and managing a project in order to achieve a predefined goal or outcome. It is one of my favorite areas to explore, I worked as a project coordinator for a couple of years after my initial software engineering days, and during that time I acquired a lot of skills in project management. I completed my CAPM certification in 2023 and since explored project management field, especially in the IT sector. I think PM is a really good skill to have if you are in the tech industry. Having both dev and pm skills and experience has helped me a lot to understand the big picture.

In todays article I thought of talking about a few tools which I have used as a PM person, both professionally and academically. The three tools I’m going to talk about are,

• JIRA

• Trello

• Asana

Lets start with JIRA. I’ve used JIRA in every company I’ve worked for so far, as a software engineer, project coordinator and a business analyst. JIRA is the ultimate tool for an agile team, its used for issue tracking, task management, and sprint planning. Basically its a workflow management and issue tracking tool,

• Managing software development projects

• Tracking bugs & issues

• Sprint planning and reporting

JIRA operates in a hierarchical manner.

• Project - A collection of tasks & issues related to a goal.

• Epics - Big chunks of work (like a feature).

• Story - Your user stories within an epic

• Tasks - Individual pieces of work within an epic/ story.

• Subtasks - Smaller breakdowns of a task.

• Bug - QA findings when the deliverable doesn’t fulfill the requirements of a task/ subtask

• Board types:

  • Scrum board (for sprint-based teams)

  • Kanban board (for continuous workflow)

If you want to get hands-on with JIRA, you can try it out at home too. If you don’t have access to JIRA, or sign up for a free trial.

Create a JIRA Project

• Click on "Create Project"

• Select Scrum/Kanban (Scrum if sprint-based, Kanban for a flow). We are going with Scrum for now

• Give it a name

Create an Epic

• Click "Backlog" > Create Epic

• Give it a name

Add a User Story/Task/Bug

• Click "Create Issue" > Choose Story/Task/Bug

• Fill the required information

• Assign to a team member. I will assign it to myself in this case

Move Tasks on the Board

• Drag & drop a task from To Do > In Progress > Done

Check out the below scrum board I have created. As you can see its very easy to manage and visualize the status of your ongoing sprint using JIRA.

JIRA has a few reports as well as a dashboard feature that you can use to get better insights and quick analytics of your ongoing projects status. Some of the reports include,

• Burndown Chart – Shows progress in a sprint

• Velocity Chart – Tracks completed work over sprints

• Cumulative Flow Diagram – Analyzes bottlenecks

You can go to the reports tab and explore different charts as per your requirement.

Next up we are going to talk about Trello. Trello is a tool I used when I was in university. I used it to manage my small projects, both academic and my personal projects. Think of it as a digital whiteboard with sticky notes.

Trello is not as advanced as JIRA. I use it for simple project management, personal to-do lists and collaboration with teams. For example, lets say you are doing a group project in your class and you want to distribute your work among team members, set deadlines, share each others work and track if you are within the timeline. For such a simple task, its not practical to use a tool like JIRA. That’s where Trello comes in.

Trello has three elements. Boards, Lists and Cards.

• Boards – Your entire project

• Lists – Stages of work ("To Do", "In Progress", "Done")

• Cards – Individual tasks

Additionally you can add labels, checklists, attachments and due dates. Below is a simple Trello board I made for myself to brush up my knowledge on different PM tools,

Using checklists for broader items can help you track how much of a portion is completed from a card.

In the above card, 4 out 4 subtasks have been completed. Power ups are another cool feature in Trello where you can Integrate with Slack, Google Drive, etc. If you go to Add Power-Ups it will open a window like this,

I added a cool Power-Up called Card Done, which allows me to update a card as done with a single click.

When you click on Done, your card will be automatically moved to the Done column.

I like Trello a lot, for simple project management and I also love making lists, so I have a lot of Trello boards which I use for my personal work.

Next tool we are going to look at is Asana. Now I have to be honest, I haven’t used Asana a lot. Its just it was never a tool that was used in any of the organizations I’ve worked for. So I thought I will learn Asana on my own.

Asana is a work management tool much like JIRA. Some of its key features include,

• Projects – Create workspaces for different projects

• Tasks & Subtasks – Assign tasks, add details, and break them down

• Due Dates & Priorities – Stay on schedule

• Kanban View – Visualize work like Trello

• Calendar & Timeline – See deadlines clearly

Asana is heavily used in the IT industry for agile project management, organizing requirements, tracking stakeholder requests. When I started learning Asana, I created a free account and just started playing with the different features available. If you are already familiar with agile and JIRA, then it wont be a problem for you.

Heres a quick hands-on task for you,

• Go to Asana and create a free account

• Create a project

• Add a few tasks

• Select how you want to view your project, whether its a board, timeline or list etc.

• Move your tasks around and explore different views

Of course there are much more features available in Asana which you should definitely explore, use and learn. I really like the dashboard feature in Asana, it helps me get a really clear overall picture of my project and its current status.

To summarize what we learned in todays article, JIRA, Trello are Asana are well known project management tools used by both academics and professionals to workflow management and issue tracking. JIRA is probably the best known out of these three tools, which offers a comprehensive set of tools and features to help you manage your projects in an agile environment. Trello is a sweet and simple project management tool, better suited for very small and simple projects. Asana is a very user friendly option which is easy to use and has a cleaner interface. Now of course when to use Trello is somewhat clear to us. But the big question is JIRA or Asana?

Jira is generally considered better for technical teams and software development projects due to its advanced features and agile methodology support, while Asana is more user-friendly and suitable for broader business teams with simpler project management needs, offering a cleaner interface and easier collaboration features. I think the key difference between the two comes with their target audience. JIRA is targeted at software development teams and IT professionals, while Asana can cater to a wider range of teams across an organization, especially business teams.

How I like to think of it is, if your team is mostly technical and you require agile support then go for JIRA. If your team has a lot of members from non IT departments, then go for Asana.

This brings us to the end of todays article on PM tools. Now this is only a very high level and basic introduction to these tools. As someone who has used all three, these tools will help you a lot when you start working in the tech industry, regardless of your department. Go ahead and get your hands dirty, use these tools, explore different features and learn through trail and error. That way when you get you a professional setting, you are already familiar with the terminology and when you know the basics of any tool, it becomes very easy to learn the rest.