Background

Those of you who are familiar with our flagship product, Structure for Jira, know that we offer some optional capabilities in the form of Structure extensions. These are optional apps that you may install and use together with Structure, or not, depending on your needs. For example, Structure.Pages adds Confluence integration to Structure. Introduced in 2016, it’s useful in any organization that uses Confluence and Jira (and Structure). But if you don’t use Confluence, you aren’t going to be interested.

In February 2018, we introduced our newest extension for Structure called Structure.Gantt. As the name implies, it’s a Gantt solution for Jira that runs on top of Structure. When we introduced it, we announced that it would initially be free, given that it was a comparatively new Gantt solution for Jira. We also suggested that it would not be free forever. That day has arrived.

In addition, there are two major new features in 2.0, which we think you’re going to want to know about.

No Longer Free

Since its introduction, we have continued to invest in Structure.Gantt — continuously adding new capabilities while also enhancing many of the early features. We have also uniquely tailored our Gantt solution to the world of agile SDLCs.

Now, with the introduction of Structure.Gantt 2.0, we have taken things to yet another level. One that we feel makes our Gantt offering for Jira uniquely competitive — and one that warrants a fair price that will enable us to continue investing in its development.

We believe you will agree.

Even so, to make the free-to-paid-app transition a bit easier for our existing customers, we offered them a two-year extension for their free Structure.Gantt licenses. Within a day or two of the release, customers who registered for the free 2-year license will receive instructions via the ALM Works Service Desk ticket that they opened when they registered.

So what will Structure.Gantt cost? Well, the full price list for Structure.Gantt 2.0 will be available via the Atlassian Marketplace the day that we release version 2, but here’s a preview:

Note: Unfortunately, Structure.Gantt is not yet available for Jira Cloud. However, work has recently begun on a Cloud version. Stay tuned.

About Those Important New Features

There are two very important new features in Structure.Gantt: Resource Leveling and Baselines. Both have been in high demand from our existing users.

Resource Leveling

In A Guide to the Project Management by the Project Management Institute, resource leveling is described as "A technique in which start and finish dates are adjusted based on resource limitations with the goal of balancing the demand for resources with the available supply." Pretty simple, right?

Software developers and other project team members frequently contribute to more than one project — simultaneously. And those commitments change — frequently. Keeping track of these changing one-to-many/resources-to-projects relationships is tricky, to say the least.

For those organizations that use Jira to help track these things, being able to visualize resource allocation is super helpful for project managers. Structure alone (without the Structure.Gantt extension) enables you to see what’s happening on a spreadsheet-like canvas where your columns can contain resource-related data expressed in text, number, and wiki markup form.

Like other Gantt solutions, Structure.Gantt enables you to visualize resource allocation on a Gantt chart. In version 2.0 you’ll also be able to auto-calculate the schedule changes needed to resolve over allocation and see the impact to your timelines.

You can learn more about Resource Leveling by having a look at our Structure.Gantt documentation.

Baselines

Another oft-requested new feature has been Baselines. Baselines allow you to visually compare the project schedule as it looks today with the way it looked at some point in the past.

This means you can visually compare the current project timeline to a previously saved snapshot, or compare one view of the project with another (e.g., the project manager's view to the development team's view).

By creating a snapshot of the Gantt chart at a particular moment in time, and then placing it alongside the current chart, you can see at a glance which tasks are behind or ahead of a reference schedule — and how that impacts the project's timeline.

You can learn more about Baselines by having a look at our Structure.Gantt documentation.

New Pricing for Structure.Pages

On a related note, we are using this opportunity to announce important pricing changes for Structure.Pages as well — we are reducing its price significantly (by 50% at most user tiers).

Why? When we released Structure.Pages, we felt it was a powerful Structure extension for large organizations that use both Confluence and Jira (and Structure) extensively. However, we have come to believe it can also be very useful for smaller organizations that may use these tools less extensively.

The new pricing makes Structure.Pages more affordable for these organizations (and the larger ones, too).

Next Steps

To learn more about Structure.Gantt, visit its page on the Atlassian Marketplace. If you want to be notified about the forthcoming release of Structure.Gantt 2.0, you can select “Watch app” on that page. Alternatively, you can send a note to gantt@almworks.com and ask us to notify you.

To learn more about the new pricing for Structure.Pages, visit its page on the Atlassian Marketplace.