With many different project management tools and the need to share tasks and communicate status across teams and even organizations, IT pros should be working to develop a project management integration strategy to help business and IT teams collaborate across different tools and create dashboards that consolidate projects. There are a number of options, but low-code tools help ease the process.
Many DevOps tools already integrate with project management tools, such as GitHub integrating with Jira. Companies also can integrate multiple tools using an iPaaS, or integration platform as a service. iPaaS can provide the flexibility to create integrations with other types of applications, as well.
Another method to integrate these applications is to use a low-code tool such as Unito, a rules-based integration platform that focuses primarily on project management tools and DevOps applications. While Unito.io has a fairly limited set of applications it can sync, this type of application should be on IT organizations’ radar. Its simplicity makes it accessible to end users who want to automate workflow but don’t have a compelling enough business case to justify allocating development resources to build custom integrations.
For an IT organization supporting business users of project management applications, Unito can provide a way to offload creating and managing integrations among the different project management tools in use. Unito also gives IT a way to let business users manage their end of digital transformation projects without having to adopt and access more IT-centric tools such as Jira or GitHub. IT teams using ZenDesk, Jira, GitHub and GitLab should also evaluate Unito as a way to integrate those applications as part of their DevOps practices in a simple, lightweight way.
Unito does much of the heavy lifting developers would otherwise need to do to integrate these applications; users need only define how data will synchronize through a set of forms. By following a number of simple steps and using easy-to-understand business rules, a relatively sophisticated end user or business analyst could connect two different project management applications.
For example, to integrate Trello and Wrike, end users first choose the projects that will sync. Then, using a basic form-based wizard, they can map cards or tasks, creating associations between project objects in one application with those in another. For example, a user could associate a column of cards in Trello with a list in another application.
Essentially any object in one application can be synced by mapping a relationship to an object in another application–even custom fields. This is the kind of flexibility that makes it relatively easy for a business user familiar with specific applications to build a workflow that passes tasks from one to another. This allows teams to have accountability for work even if two teams use different applications. This can ease, for example, hand-offs from a marketing team to the IT organization tasked with implementing technical changes. The marketing team can pass information from its work management application to IT’s DevOps management tools without having to manually enter information in a help desk request form.
For Trello users, Unito has a feature called Mirror, a Trello Power-Up that allows the same card to exist on multiple boards simultaneously. Changes to one card will automatically be propagated to the other instances of that card. This type of feature shows how low-code tools can actually be quite powerful, reducing the need for an IT department to develop integrations in a more sophisticated tool, such as a BPM tool or enterprise service bus.
