“We’ve always done it this way” – and how Structure helped change that
Tempo Team
Key Takeaways
Structure empowered Veracity Cyber’s Dustin MacBrayne to lead a successful, grassroots transformation from Microsoft Project to Jira by listening to users and rebuilding their workflows without needing admin access.
By using Structure to normalize chaos and create intuitive, real-time views, Dustin turned Jira into a powerful planning platform that aligned teams and eliminated status-reporting headaches.
What began as resistance evolved into advocacy, as even the most skeptical users became champions of Structure, driving adoption and best practices across the organization.
Lenny didn’t want to change. A master scheduler with decades of experience, he’d spent his career perfecting government plans in Microsoft Project. For Lenny and his team, the idea of switching to Jira felt like a downgrade – unfamiliar, complicated, and missing the critical tools they relied on. They had every reason to resist.
But change wasn’t optional.
After a senior leader saw the success Dustin MacBrayne was having with another team – organizing complex work in Jira and Structure with clarity and control – they made the call: Lenny’s team would move to Jira, too.
At first, Lenny pushed back. The new system didn’t do what he needed. The old one worked just fine. And why fix something that wasn’t broken?
That’s when Dustin stepped in.
Dustin, a strategist and solution architect at Veracity Cyber, was brought in to guide the transition. Armed with deep Jira knowledge, a project manager’s knack for translating chaos into clarity, and one game-changing tool – Structure – he quietly started to turn things around.
Instead of forcing new workflows on the team, Dustin listened. Every complaint became a requirement. Every blocker, a challenge to overcome. And with Structure, he rebuilt the familiar workflows Lenny knew – only better. Gantt charts? Check. Custom baselines? You bet. A live view of work that anyone could update and access, from anywhere? That was new – and powerful.
Now? Lenny’s one of Structure’s biggest advocates, creating sophisticated views and custom reports weekly. “He went from full resistance to full ownership,” says Dustin. “He’s running baselines like a madman. It’s incredible to see.”
Veracity Cyber - Dustin on alignment
Dustin MacBrayne, Strategist at Veracity Cyber, on how he uses Structure to align teams at scale.
Driving org-wide alignment – from the trenches
Lenny’s story is powerful, but it’s Dustin MacBrayne’s role in it that tells the bigger story.
Dustin is what Tempo calls the squishy middle: not a system admin, not senior leadership, but the person in the trenches driving real transformation. People like Dustin sit at the intersection of strategy and execution. They understand what the business needs, what the tools can do, and – crucially – how to bridge the gap between the two.
But in many large organizations, including government departments like the ones Dustin supports, change is hard. Legacy systems are deeply entrenched. Admin access is tightly controlled. And even small improvements require navigating a complex maze of approvals.
Structure gives people like Dustin the power to lead change anyway.
Because Structure works at the project level – not just globally – it allows users like Dustin to build, replicate, and share project templates without needing system-level access. He can define issue types, workflows, permission schemes, and views once – and apply them anywhere.
“I don’t have to ask permission every time I want to scale something that works – with Structure, I just do it.”
Dustin MacBrayne, Strategist, Veracity Cyber
That independence means more consistency across projects, better adherence to best practices, and a huge reduction in administrative overhead. For Dustin, it also means less time explaining data – and more time driving outcomes.
From chaos to clarity
When Dustin first began to support his government customer, he realized the Jira instance he had available was massive in size, and not locally managed. Thousands of projects. Hundreds of custom fields. No consistent naming conventions. “Everyone was using different words for the same things,” Dustin says. “It made reporting almost impossible.”
One of the first things he did? Normalize the chaos. By identifying core fields (like start date, end date, and story points) and using Structure’s formulas and custom columns, he created shared views that translated confusing Jira data into something everyone could understand.
Structure let him transform and group data in intuitive ways – by location, by portfolio, by release. “It didn’t matter if one team called it ‘widget’ and another called it ‘wodget,’” Dustin explains. “Structure let me map them both to a common term. That changed everything.”
Leaders could finally see what was happening across projects – live, accurate, and without the need for endless meetings or spreadsheets.
“I used to spend days tracking down status updates. Now I can open a view and know exactly where a project stands. That’s a massive time saver – for me, and for them.”
Dustin MacBrayne, Strategist, Veracity Cyber
Replacing Microsoft Project – and winning hearts and minds
The team that Lenny belonged to was one of the last holdouts for Microsoft Project. They were vocal about what Jira lacked – and how it couldn’t possibly replace the precision of their old tools.
But Dustin didn’t try to convince them with slides or sales pitches. He showed them – one feature at a time – how Structure could do what MS Project did (and then some). “Every complaint became a design prompt,” he says. “I took what they said they couldn’t do and figured out a way to do it.”
Veracity Cyber - Dustin on MS Project to Jira migration
Dustin MacBrayne, Strategist at Veracity Cyber, on how Structure empowered the team to migrate from MS Project to Jira.
Over time, the team began to see the value. Jira wasn’t just a place to log tasks – it became a real project management platform. With Structure, they could visualize dependencies, manage baselines, and build out work breakdown structures tailored to their needs.
More importantly, they could collaborate in real time – a massive leap forward from their static, file-based MS Project workflows.
A year later, the same team is now leading the charge. They’re Structure power users, helping other teams adopt the platform and championing it at events. “It’s like watching a character arc in a show,” Dustin laughs. “They’ve gone from skeptics to superusers.”
Structure helps people like Dustin MacBrayne make a real impact – no admin access required. It empowers planning leaders to drive alignment, cut through complexity, and lead meaningful change.
Even in the most complex environments, Structure turns Jira chaos into clarity.