Best practice for tracking ongoing tasks?

Question

How should things that go on for indefinite periods like participation in working groups, standards committees, and so on be tracked and managed?

These can't be issues that sit in a To Do or On Hold board, nor are they a match for an In Progress service request. They will be there forever. A "time to resolution" that only closes once a year only to start up again would be soul sucking. Yet they still needs to be tracked somehow as an ongoing commitment, something that consumes resources.

A working group meeting a month of 2 or 3 hours, plus effort between meetings for pre- and post- work of at least the same (there's not point in being involved at all if there isn't between work). That adds up to significant expenditure to be aware of and manage. We could add each meeting as it's own task, and then the same for each action item, but then there's no view on what the whole 'project' costs.

What's best practice for things like this in the Jira platform?

Jason Popko · Answer

I am trying to figure this out for our marketing team to track ongoing social media work. I will use the idea of quarters. Love it. I will keep future quarters in the backlog. Current quarter in In Progress

HN_ioosty · Answer

Perhaps a solution would be something like creating releases you can then group your recurring activities under.  This would keep you in one tracking platform and you can set appropriate start and end for each one per year, quarter or month.  It would mean creating the new ones as soon as you complete the cycle of the one before.  Still trying to get this figured out myself but hope this helps.

Matt Wilkie · Answer

We didn't come up with something that really works. We're currently discussing just not tracking things at all in Jira that aren't suited for it, rather than attempt to bend Jira like this. The other major category of items that don't work well are the little things: an hour responding to this phone call issue, 30 minutes in that impromptu hallway meeting.

These two categories: long and ongoing, small and unpredictable, still need to be tracked somehow, but not in Jira I don't think. It just adds too much complexity, and then we tend to avoid using Jira for things that are good in it.

We're finding it very challenging to find a level of granularity that provides insight, and is thus empowering, yet coarse enough that attending to (feeding) the level of detail doesn't suck the life right out of us.