Hello from Denise R

Denise Ruhoff

Love this new community space & layout...much more engaging UI. What I'm working on in life - some assemblance of balance. What I'm working in my job is seeking out information and mentoring (verbal) from a neutral source on:

• What metrics I should be using in the Kanban to indicate healthy teams?
• Are there better or different sprint reports to convey a healthy, responsive team?
• What tips & tricks have you found and still use with JIRA & Confluence?
• What capabilities in JIRA & Confluence should I use to better communicate progress & change to stakeholders not engaged at the sprint level?
• How have you successfully used confluence calendars for releases & teams?

Thank you all!

Wade Tracy _Boise_ ID_

Hey Denise, welcome!  I'll take a stab at answering some of your questions, but hopefully there are some others out there with more experience than me

 

• What metrics I should be using in the Kanban to indicate healthy teams?
  • In Jira, I've always used the Cummulative Flow Diagram as my main tool to see how the team is doing.  If you see any one 'band' growing faster than the other then you know you have some kind of bottleneck.  It's a great visual way to see if you team's current bandwith is sustainable or if issues will continue to build.
  • The other great report to use is the Control Chart, but it takes a little more work to learn how to read it.  It's a good way to see if you have any outliers which could indicate issues that your team is ignoring or don't have good requirements.
• Are there better or different sprint reports to convey a healthy, responsive team?
  • Those are the ones I use.  I know that Retrospectives aren't part of Kanban, but it can be good to meet every so often to see if people are struggling with things they haven't bothered to bring up on their own.  There are also some 'plays' at Atlassian Team Playbook which is a free resource that outlines different activities you can do with your teams to help answer questions, make decisions, etc.  The Health Monitor is a good way to determine if there are things you can work on. 
  • I just realized you may be talking about scrum teams too.  The big ones for me are the Burndown, Sprint and Velocity charts.  There is also some good resources at Atlassian Agile  
• What tips & tricks have you found and still use with JIRA & Confluence?
  • My favorites: 
    • The ability to create Jira issues from Confluence
    • Standardizing workflows and custom fields -- it leads to good conversations about why people are sure they need to do things differently than everyone else
    • I'll add more as I think of them--I think I take things for granted now and have forgotten the little 'aha!' moments.
  • Recent ideas I had that I'm in the process of implementing:
    • Having some key metrics I can give to stakeholders as a 'state of Jira' report
    • Be proactive by anticipating the needs of users and reaching out to communicate possibilities within Jira and find out if they are having problems--I've found that most people just 'deal' with problems unless somebody gives them a forum to give feedback.
• What capabilities in JIRA & Confluence should I use to better communicate progress & change to stakeholders not engaged at the sprint level?
  • We are using Confluence and Domo for this.  I would just use Confluence if I could, but we have executives that are used to Domo and won't bother with Confluence.
  • In Confluence, we use the Jira macros to show sprint and feature progress at a high level (issue name and status).  I know our PMs do other things as well, but I'm never in the status meetings so I can't offer much more than that.
• How have you successfully used confluence calendars for releases & teams?
  • We haven't used confluence calendars because I've heard they aren't that great.  One of the things that blew me away at Summit though, was Outlook Calendars for Confluence.  I haven't used it yet, but the demo was cool.