I am finding Jira/Attlassian either too complex or (worse) too flakey

[IT Team]

New to Atlassian and evaluating Jira and was planning to adopt the Premium Teams collection. I am starting just with Jira and want to use Goals, but I am finding Jira one of the flakiest bits of (enterprise potential) software I have used for a long time. 

Do other people have this experience? I have invited the users, they have gone through the sign up, but on the User directory, they still show as invited (as opposed to active). They are active working users. This is four or five hours after they have completed their activation (incase it is laggy).

I added an active user to goals, and they appeared in the list of users with access to Goals. Suddenly they are no longer on that list - they appear to have lost access - no changes to groups, spaces or any other setting.

There are actually an endless number of weird quirks in the way this software works for me. Is this a common experience, or (1) am I doing something wrong, or (2) is it such a complex (or poorly designed admin interface) that I need to invest many, many more hours simply getting it set up? On the other hand - it is not just me - why are users still showing as invited when they have gone through the whole process of accepting and still not showing as active?

My planned approach was to start with the most simple Jira set up, five users, a small number of spaces and to build up from there. I do realise that this is complex and scalable software but if every single config process is hard to implement, requires repeated attempts and possibly even access to support, it is not going to work for my organisation.

Any thoughts or shared experiences from others would be welcome.

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @IT Team,

Over the last year or so, the Atlassian Platform has grown significantly to become an integrated suite of products capable of supporting teams across your entire organisation.Indeed, getting started can be a bit overwhelming at first. 

Specifically about the active users display: yes, there can be a delay before the status is displayed accurately. When you're getting started, this can be a bit confusing, but after onboarding, it is an area of the application you normally won't pay that much attention to anymore. 

Your approach is perfectly fine. You can get started exactly the way you describe: start small, learn the system e.g. by starting from templates and progress while you learn.

There are several training tracks you can access from this Community platform, aimed at specific products or even user types in your organisation:

• Access to learning paths 
• Jira specific training 
• Jira Admin learning path 

Once you have put your initial setup (proper permission configuration, default space configuration, basic governance and ways of working) in place, you should really be able to get all the value out of the system.

If you feel stuck at this stage, it might be worthwile bringing in an Atlassian Solutions Partner to help you get bootstrapped quickly and help you over that first hurdle.

Hope this helps!

[IT Team]

Thanks for your encouraging and helpful advice, and I will persevere for a while longer, and also investigate partner support, but I am currently not thinking that Jira is suitable for ordinary users (I have many years of experience in ITSM).

The email invites to users simply don't work reliably. On the third, fourth or fifth attempt, it might send an invite. I am now seeing duplicate users in the Jira user directory.

When setting up a company-managed Kanban software board, I am unable to drag the backlog column to the backlog panel, despite clear documentation indicating how this should work, which would allow me to separate the backlog from the main columns.

I have tried these various actions on three different browsers and two different computers and with alternative network connections - simply to head off the inevitable support comment - it is something to do with my setup/ something to do with me, but in any case, onboarding issues like this are often a clear indicator of how our user experience will develop over time. I do not want to spend my life as an admin, literally fighting the system every step of the way.

As I say, I will press ahead, but the issues I am facing are Jira issues, not caused by me, and it is a worrying sign. 

Thanks again for your encouragement.