[Feedback Request] How can we improve your team's way of working?

[Lisa]

Hi everyone!

I'm a Product Manager in the Jira team and I'm currently exploring how Jira can better help your team improve their way of working. Whether it's team or individual performance, I'm interested to understand how Jira can better support you and your team drive a continuous improvement culture in your team. What strategies have worked for you? What challenges have you faced?

If you're interested in sharing your thoughts, experiences, or suggestions, we would be delighted to hear from you. Your feedback will be instrumental in shaping the future of Jira and helping us create an in-product experience that continuously creates high-performing teams.

You can book a 30 minute chat in my calendar here: https://calendly.com/lisafeedback/30min. If you're keen to share your insights with us, will thank you for your time with a e-gift voucher valued at USD$50!

Thanks,
Lisa

[Alex Young]

Usability, usability, usability! A work management tool is necessary for my organization to get anything done in a timely manner, let alone being reflective and communicating across teams thereby leading to continuous improvement. In my organization people have a tendency to get overwhelmed with Jira because they don't understand the interface it and then just abandon it. 

The truth is, as I see it, the big value-added benefits of Jira (e.g., automation capabilities) are really good, but they are largely invisible to the average user. Users use the tool as it is presented to them and immediate usability in Jira is not always the best. We can't be reflexive in a data-driven way when we aren't on the same tooling.

Strategies that work:

• Onboarding and continuous education on how to use Jira, making sure users understand the components of an issue and how to engage with others (e.g., comments and mentions).
• Scheduling recurring retros.
• Have a single, centralized place for people to write down things for retros in the moment.
• Me being available to answer questions about the interface (e.g., "what does this mean?" "what does this button do?")

Things that get in the way:

• People are busy and do not take the time to reflect or forget things they think in the moment when it comes time for retro.
• Metrics are not always readily available to be tracked/viewed.
• People get frustrated with Jira because they feel it is not intuitive enough, so they just go off and do their own things outside of the tool, using their own tool or no tool at all which prevents good reflection and ongoing improvement.
• People not keeping their issues updated with the correct status so a lot of reporting we try to do is often out of date, which means our reporting and then our reflection is more difficult.

Here are some suggestions:

• When a user goes to enter a comment on an issue that they are not the assignee, if a small help bubble or something could pop up to remind them that they can @ mention other users, that would be a great nudge. Keeping communication in the application has been super important for us.
• In Jira Work Management (the tool most of our organization uses), if a task is a child to an epic, it appears nested under the epic in the "List" view, which is good. However, that nesting does not happen in the "Timeline" view. Nesting happens for sub-tasks and their parent tasks, but not for epics. Our users anticipate a Gantt Chart-like experience and have told me that this oversight makes the view useless for them. Keeping work organized in this way is important for keeping us moving quickly and across teams.
• Across all Jira products, have fields included (i.e., not needing to purchase an add-on) which show:
  • How long the issue has been in its current state
  • The most recent comment
  • Date/time of the last comment
  • Date/time of the last edit or comment
• Have an easy mechanism built into the product where people can make quick notes about pain points they experience or things they like. Folks will often have a pain point, but do not take note of it in the moment (they have to open another tool), so they forget when it comes time for a retro. Having a living list of items that is easy to add to, would help.
• Have a section in a JWM project dedicated to retros or continuous improvement. This is where the above list could live and you could choose metrics to embed in the interface to track.
• Our teams have a way of adding work to projects quickly and without thought to keeping it organized, and as I said above, epics in JWM are limited. Having the ability as an admin to enable some queue-forming functionality similar to JSM, would really help keep folks organized and moving forward.
• Having a built-in time tracking feature with a start and stop clock button. There are add-ons for this, but money is tight. Having this available would help with time tracking and therefore make it easier to do some data-driven reflection.

[Lisa]

Hi Alex,

Thank you very much for taking the time to provide this response! Your comments have offered valuable insights and touched on some areas we've been discussing internally.

I'd love to better understand the role you play at your organisation and also some of the challenges you're facing in tracking/viewing certain metrics. Feel free to directly email me at lsutherland@atlassian.com