One thing we spend a lot of time thinking about with Jira admin work is how hard it is to answer the simple question of "Are we actually making any difference?"
Most teams we speak to are doing some version of:
- running audits or health checks
- cleaning up fields, projects, workflows
- fixing issues as they come up
However, tracking that progress over time is surprisingly unclear, and then a lot of people find that you fix 50 unused fields but new ones get created or you run a health check without actually really knowing what “good” is supposed to look like for you.
Essentially, it ends up being a lot of frustrating activity, without a clear sense of progress?
We’ve been thinking about this more recently and started experimenting with a more goal-based approach to tracking Jira health.
Instead of just surfacing issues to respond to in an ad hoc way, the idea behind this is to instil best practices for Jira maintenance by:
- setting a target (e.g. reduce warnings/failures to X)
- tracking progress against that goal over time
- using that as a way to analyse and prioritise effort
We’ve started building this into our health checks in Optimizer for Jira, tying goals directly to the number of warnings/failures you want to reduce, and then using the Optimizer Rovo Agent to guide us through what needs doing to achieve those goals in a more detailed and bespoke way.
Super curious how others are approaching this, though!
Do you track improvement in Jira in a structured way?
Do you set targets/benchmarks, or is it more ad hoc?
How do you know when your instance is “in a good place”?
Would be really interested to hear how different teams handle this, at the moment.
