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Jira: How to Activate the Integration

Ensure that you and your developers are on the same page by synchronizing your Jira projects. Choose the project or epic you want to copy, then sit back as changes made in either system sync in real time.

If your developers love Jira, you can still use ProjectManager for high-level roadmaps, dashboards and reporting. We have two main options for integrating with Jira:

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Getting Started

To set up the Jira integration for the first time you'll need to have high level access to your ProjectManager and Jira accounts. Please check that you meet the specific requirements below before activating the integration.

On the ProjectManager side you'll need:
  • A Business or Enterprise edition account (to see the Integrations menu)
  • The Manage Integrations permission (admins have this by default)
On the Jira side you'll need:
  • Access to your Jira account
  • Permission to create Jira API tokens
  • An API token created by a user that has permission to create Jira webhooks
    • Currently this means that the person who creates the API token must have "Administer Jira" Global Permission in Jira (also known as Org Admin). To test this, the user that will create the API token can follow these instructions to navigate to Jira's Webhooks page. If a user can access that page they can create an API token to set up your integration. If you cannot access this page, please contact your Org Admin in Jira and ask them to create an API token.

Note that your team members do not need this level of access to use the integration day-to-day, this is just what you'll require for the initial activation.

Activating Jira in the Integration Marketplace

To get started you'll need to activate Jira in our integration marketplace.

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  1. Navigate to the Jira integration
  2. Click Activate at the top right (it may take 30 seconds for the next screen to appear)
  3. Enter your Jira credentials
    1. Jira account email - The email you use when you log into Jira
    2. Jira API token - Find your Jira API tokens here
    3. Jira account domain - Find your Jira domain here

      This is the URL you use when you access your Jira account, you only need to enter the part between the slashes:

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  4. Now you can toggle the Jira copy and sync integrations on or off

Once activated, your team will see new Jira options when creating new projects:

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The first time your team members choose to Copy or Sync with Jira, they'll be asked to log in to their own Jira account. This allows ProjectManager to access their specific Jira projects securely. This connection step only happens once.

One-time Jira Copy

You can copy an entire Jira project or a single epic. Changes made to the Jira issues later are not synced between the systems, you get a static copy of your work at a point in time. This allows you to:

  • Copy upcoming epics to plan your roadmap in the ProjectManager Gantt view
  • Copy completed sprints to see progress in your ProjectManager dashboards
  • Copy an entire Jira project to plan your upcoming work or migrate between tools

When creating a new project, choose to Copy from Jira. The next screen lets you choose to copy all issues in that project or only specific epics:

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Clicking "Create Project With These Issues" creates a new project and copies the selected issues as tasks. The project that's created will be automatically named based on your selections, but you can change this later if needed.

All the usual project-level security rules apply to this new project.

Real-time Jira Sync

This feature is part of our Advanced Collaboration Bundle
Need access? Purchase the add-on

This integration imports an entire Jira project to ProjectManager, and then any changes you make in one system are automatically copied to the other. For example:

  • As developers make progress in Jira, their status changes show in ProjectManager
  • If you change task priorities in ProjectManager, developers see that on their Jira board
  • The project name changes in Jira

When creating a new project, choose Sync with Jira. The next screen lets you choose the Jira project you'd like to work with:

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Clicking "Sync This Project" creates a new project and copies over the issues as tasks. The project itself will be created instantly but the issues may take time to be imported as tasks, depending on the size of the project.

Tasks added, removed or changed in this project will reflect in the Jira project instantly, and vice versa. There's an icon beside the project name so that the rest of the team understands that the project has this special behavior:

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The project owner and manager can disable syncing at any time, just click the icon shown above and then click the Stop Syncing button:

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If you choose to stop syncing with Jira, the project itself and all its tasks will remain available in both Jira and ProjectManager, however, future changes won't synchronize between the systems. You cannot re-sync a project after stopping it, but you can start afresh by creating a new project and choosing the "Sync with Jira" option.

Which Fields Are Synchronized?

Many fields map directly between Jira to ProjectManager:

  • Issue name → Task name
  • Issue summary → Task description
  • Issue priority → Task priority
  • Issue labels → Task tags
  • Issue status → Task status (board column)

Please be aware of some of these special scenarios:

  • Jira issues don't have start and finish dates so these default to the issue creation date
  • We do our best to match assignees in each system based on their name, to avoid confusion we recommend creating users with matching names in each system, however, if no match can be found we handle it as follows:
    • Jira to ProjectManager → A new user is created without a role, this incurs no cost
    • ProjectManager to Jira → The issue will appear unassigned
  • Jira only allows a single assignee per issue, if you assign multiple people to a task in ProjectManager only one will be applied to the matching Jira issue
  • Jira uses statuses to indicate progress, ProjectManager supports statuses but also has a concept of percent complete, so we do the following:
    • If a Jira issue is marked as done we will set it to 100% complete in ProjectManager, which gives you an approximate representation of progress in your dashboards and reports
    • Changes to progress in ProjectManager are not sent to Jira
    • Status changes are synced between the systems, so you can use workflow automation to create more advanced mapping of status to progress, for example: "if status becomes in progress, set progress to 50%"
  • Jira boards can contain multiple statuses in each column, in ProjectManager each status has its own column. Therefor, even though statuses are in sync, the board views may look slightly different.
  • If you use the default Jira priorities then they'll map to ProjectManager as below. Note that if you remove a default priority from your Jira account, changing the priority of a ProjectManager task may no longer be synced to the matching Jira issue. 
    • Highest → Very High
    • High → High
    • Medium → Medium
    • Low → Low
    • Lowest → Very Low
    • Custom priorities → Medium
  • Jira tags cannot have spaces in them. If you apply a tag with spaces from within ProjectManager, a new tag without spaces will be created and used instead so that the syncing can continue.
  • We use custom fields to store Jira-specific data such as:
    • Issue ID
    • Issue Link
    • Issue Type
    • Parent Issue ID

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, check out our integration troubleshooting page.

You can always contact us with additional questions or concerns!