Jira Software Use in Project management and innovations

[Darren Van Zanden]

Hey Community, 

We have recently adopted JIRA software as our project management tool in my companies innovations team. I am the IT project manager for our company and would be interested to know if there is other people out there using this to control IT projects and to record un sponsored projects and what swim lane titles you have in your kanban boards. Currently I am only using to do, in progress, blocked and done. I am wanting to add more for visibility like investigating and scoping etc but would like to see how other companies do it.

Any advice appreciated.

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

Hi Darren, 

It's hard to give concrete advice without understanding your use-case in more detail.

However, you are off to a great start, using the simplest process possible. It's easy to add more structure and complexity as it emerges, but it's hard to reduce complexity once it's in place.

People's main gripe with Jira is that the processes are overly complex and add a lot of needless effort. Too many fields to complete or phases in the procedure are only two examples. As a result, unless the extra workflow stages (investigating, scoping) significantly increase value, I would consider leaving things alone for the time being.

Keep your process as lightweight as possible. 

Hope this helps!