Best way to build some simple workflows in Jira?

[relindwto6]

We're a new fintech team, who have been doing most of our work in gsuite, email, and spreadsheets. Our community of ~150 active and involved users is mostly on facebook. We track bugs and simple development in Jira software, but I'd like to start expanding on the build.

We need a tool that will (beyond software tracking):

• Do "community" pages - where small teams (say ~10) can meet and review documentation, add edits, questions, etc. At the moment, this is a facebook page, if you can believe it. It would be really nice to see the ability to tie some of those comments into our development, documents, etc. Just keeping things together, basically. I realize Jira+confluence should do this, but I'm just checking that it's the right use case. It might be overpriced (~50 seats?) for people to participate at this level.

• Create a sheet with filters that would have say, name, email, affiliation (company), $ invested, how it was invested (drop-down selection or autofill), how we received it (cash, wire, etc., again, drop down etc.), and a few similar other entries. The sheet should be able to build out workflows from it after the fact - e.g. user 1 with x affiliation has X tasks and X steps remaining to get to stage 2, which has x tasks. If this sheet could properly integrate with docusign, that would be A+ awesome. I know Jira does this but nobody on our team has put the time into setting it up. This is really key - we have this sort of long 'investor process' with multiple stages, and tracking the stages that individuals are at, and keeping all their data together, is really important. Right now it's just a gsheet.

• Other more basic business processes like simple PM. I think this can be accomplished in either core or software, but I'm not sure which to use.

I would be so, so grateful if you could shed some light on these things.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Confluence could be the right tool for your pages, especially if you want close integration with your task and issue tracking tool (Jira).  It is hard to say though, it is something you would have to try out with your authors to see what they think.

Jira is far better than a spreadsheet for tracking all your stuff (many years ago, I was part of a group that did an analysis of shared spreadsheets - we looked at about 1,000 across a business and found that about 1/3rd of single-owner ones were wrong, rising to 85% when two people were working together and 99% when it was three editors or more.  Spreadsheets are the second worst way to collaborate on data you can find)

Bt, yes, you will need to put the effort into getting it right.  One of you will need to play conslultant for a few days - go talk to the end users, find out what they think they want, sketch out their processes, ask about reporting, look at their pain-points and so-on.  Then come up with a (rough) proposal for doing it in Jira, paraphrase it back to them (don't be scared to tell them when their process is clunky or wrong), and then go implement it.