How to improve Jira discipline, i.e. keeping JIRA issues up to date such that they reflect reality.

Question

Dear community

This is something we have been challenging with for a while. We have about 1000 JIRA users in our organization, and we have implemented certain central metrics to understand how many stories / story points people are putting out, how stable velocity is, how stable sprints are (scope changes etc), and other points.

One key issue, as always, is data quality, which directly relates to how diligently people are using JIRA, i.e. updating the issue's status, closing stories on time etc. You would think that by giving teams the metrics on a team level to monitor where they stand, and to also have management regular look and review the metrics, that this would help with their "JIRA discipline", but unfortunately it does not.

Is there any best practice someone can recommend? I was thinking in Behavioural Science terms: How can we incentivize behaviour in a positive way without using the stick?

Best

Pete

sharon_ddoi39 · Answer

hello Pete,

You can incentivize this behaviour by addressing the root cause. Why do people not keep Jira upto date regularly? We have explored this topic deeply and most of the times it comes down to people hating to switch context from work to update Jira.

You can look at ways to reduce this friction. If your team uses Slack/MSFT Teams, integrating it with Jira helps. It breaks down the need for action from your team member into a single button click without leaving the chat platform. This can make all the difference in "Jira discipline".

If you are looking for simple updates in Slack, you can look in the marketplace for plugin options.

[Disclaimer] We make Jira Slack Integration bot which goes deeper into solving this problem, so opinion here is based on our customer feedback.

John Funk · Answer

Hi Pete - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I think that is something that every project manager and tool administrator struggles with.

One way we have helped with that is to get Senior Leadership (or upper management - however you want to phrase it) to really buy into and voice their support for using the system and keeping it updated. Have THEM communicate that frequently, not just you.

Also, make that a part of standups each day. If they are not doing standups, then they are not effectively doing Agile - no matter what flavor they are using. Maybe you could visit a different standup each day and praise them when you see them using it and keeping it updated.

Finally, maybe some type of physical reward for when metrics improve - like donuts or snacks or lunch catered in - reward the team that improves the most each month. Or maybe something smaller each week and something a little bigger for the monthly winner. Find out the things that would encourage them the most.

That's the behavioral science part.  :-)

Then maybe introduce some Automation where you can to help them out. Auto-transition some things when fields get updated, etc. Let the system work with them instead of against them (you can quote me on that  ;-)

Good luck! Let us know how any of that goes if you are able to do it.