Dear Work Therapist - How to make people feel confident in Jira ?

[Suvradip Paul]

Dear Work Therapist,

Hope you're doing well.

I heard about you from here .

Let me give you quick back ground and then go straight into details. I work in a team located in different time zone and use Jira Software Cloud (Company Managed) for work. I have seen some repetitive mistakes done by team which looks like going for a long while.

Please find below the major ones as described above :

1. Forgot to lodge effort on regular basis
2. Re-opening closed sub-tasks and filling effort
3. Once work is done, Forgot to change the assignee of an issue though it's being actually worked by a separate member in the team
4. Forgot to apply custom labels in sub-tasks though it's applied in Main Issue
5. Changing the status of Main Issue card as done/closed though one/many sub-tasks are open

There have  been internal training sessions and people have also gone through Atlassian University materials but honestly does not look improving quite a bit.

Could you please guide a better way to sort out these issues?

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,

Jira for Good Reasons Believer

[Kelly Drozd]

@Suvradip Paul hi there! This sounds really frustrating and I am sure many others can relate. When my former team and I were scaling Jira across our teams, we came across very similar problems (so I feel your pain).

Like you did, we also took additional time with individuals to make sure that everyone understood the basics of Jira and provided training. We did take some extra time with the people that were doing the right thing to continue to set a good example for the team. (yay champions!)

When steps were being forgotten, or people weren't doing what they were taught...so took a bit more time to really understand what might be preventing people from doing what we were asking. Maybe they forgot, or maybe there were a lot of steps to remember (processes can be complicated!). 

I would say for you - automation and setting up workflows a bit more (or differently) are going to be your best friend. Plus you will be saving yourself a headache and saving your team a lot of time to focus on more important things!

Automation can help you unburden your team from having to remember what to do when & even nudge them if they haven't updated their issues in a timely manner and so can having workflows built to match your team's process. 

Check out these automation templates that you can try out with your team. Once you see some of these & learn the basics, the sky is the limit on what you can automate and what you can customize with workflows!

Reminders

If you all are using Slack or Teams (or email), you can set nudges based on really anything you want from daily summaries to celebrating milestones! learn more here 

Changing the status of Main Issue card as done/closed though one/many sub-tasks are open

- You can synchronize parent issues and sub-tasks. With this automaton templated you can change the status of an Epic when the status of one or all of its linked issues changes. This way no one on the team ever evens needs to update the epic status, they can just make sure that their pieces of work within the epic are moving along. When the sub-tasks are done, the epic status will update as well. 

Once work is done, Forgot to change the assignee of an issue though it's being actually worked by a separate member in the team.

This is a combo of setting up workflows in your projects & using automation. For example. If every time that I transition an issue from in progress to QA it needs to go to Sally, then I can set up an automation that will auto-assign to Sally on the transition & it can make me a watcher (so I can keep an eye on what's going on from across the world with Sally's QA work). 

Here is an example we have a template for that is auto-assigning new issues. Once you get the hang of how the templates are set up you can modify and make your own. 

Forgot to apply custom labels in sub-tasks though it's applied in Main Issue

Using Jira automation you can set up an automation that could add the label from the epic or the parent issue to the subtask. I think the below is what you would be asking for:

When you create an issue, that issue should have the same label as the parent issue. (if not at the bottom of the Automation template library there is a playground that will walk you through the basics & you can try it out yourself!) 

Re-opening closed sub-tasks and filling effort

Since you are using company-managed projects, I'd check with your Jira admin to see about making some changes to your workflow setup. If it's critical that once issues are closed that they cannot be reopened or moved back to another status, that is something that can be changed.  Here is documentation about workflow configuration .

I will say that starting with the more simple workflow is a best practice so it's not overcomplicated, but as work gets more complex so can workflows so you can customize as it makes sense. 

• Jira automation guide 
• Automation template library 
• Jira automation YouTube playlist 

I hope this helps, please reach out if I missed something or if you need anything else!

Good luck! 

- Kelly 

[Suvradip Paul]

Thanks @Kelly Drozd  for your detailed reply and I must appreciate you again.

I posted mostly to get a second thought from experienced leaders, members and  off course from Atlassian Team. I am glad to see that it matches my line of thought to sort out these issues.

I would reach if something required on this.

Cheers

Suvradip

[Kishan Sharma]

I can relate to your question Suvradip.

Appreciate the detailed and effective answer by @Kelly Drozd, so apt!

[Brant Schroeder]

@Suvradip Paul Great question.  The tool is only as good as the policies and procedures you have in place.  I would start there and make sure that it is a team effort in developing them.  Once you have a solid foundation you can create workflows, automations, etc. to help support them.  

[Suvradip Paul]

Well said @Brant Schroeder ! Specially for mentioning the team effort which actually creates a strong foundation for future.

[Alex Koxaras -Relational-]

It's easy to get lost between your actual work and Jira. I can totally relate to this. However, @Kelly Drozd did a fantastic job! Kudos!

[Suvradip Paul]

Thanks @Alex Koxaras -Relational-  for your valuable inputs. I have already appreciated @Kelly Drozd and she deserves it! 

Cheers
Suvradip

[Kelly Drozd]

@Suvradip Paul & @Alex Koxaras -Relational-- you all are too kind.

Looking forward to hearing about the progress you make Suvradip, keep us in the loop.

Alex, surely I missed some Jira tips & tricks that you might have up your sleeve!