Corona management made easy with Jira

Andreas Springer _Actonic_

New rules to contain the corona pandemic have been in effect in Germany since November 24, 2021. These changes affect, among other things, the working environment. Employers have to offer their employees home office again, if possible, and those who want to go to the office have to comply with one of the three required statuses: vaccinated, recovered or tested, which is in German: "Genesen", "Geimpft", "Getestet" - that’s where the "3G" are coming from.

 

What do the new corona rules mean?

All workers must have their status proof with them when entering their workplace. The only exception is if tests are offered in the workplace, and you can be tested there directly. The employer is responsible for compliance with the rules and must check the evidence of his employees. It should be noted that rapid tests are currently only valid for 24 hours and PCR tests for 48 hours.

Here, the employers have to deal with an enormous amount of administrative work, because some evidence from employees has to be queried on a daily basis, but at the same time organized in accordance with data protection regulations and deleted after 6 months at the latest.

Review statuses and gather key information with Jira

With the help of the Atlassian ecosystem, we can present you a flexible solution that greatly simplifies your administrative work and makes your organization effective. Read now how Jira makes your life easier and reduces the effort enormously.

Set up a new Jira project

For a clear organization, we recommend creating a new project for the 3G certificates in your active Jira instance, preferably a Kanban board. You must of course note that for data protection reasons, not everyone may have access to this project. You can use “Permission Schemes” for this, for example. A Kanban board is the easiest way to organize yourself, with different columns in the form of status. You can see the status immediately at a glance and can be individually named. For example: “Open”, “Tested”, “Vaccinated”, “Recovered” and “Expired”. Here you can decide for yourself what best suits your requirements.

In our example, the tickets are on the Kanban board for your employees. Each employee has their own ticket in your project. You could use the names of the employees as the ticket title. For example, if you have previously worked with Excel, you have the option of importing this list to create tickets. So you don’t have to manually create every employee, but Jira takes care of it for you by working with your existing data. One or more additional fields should be added to the tickets to record the type and expiry date of the 3G credentials. Evidence in the form of a vaccination certificate, proof of recovery or test result can be added as an attachment to the respective ticket. In this way, you have all the information organized centrally and ready to hand whenever you need it. The respective expiry date is entered in the new field. You can flexibly adjust when the information has to be deleted from the project. In this case, it would be 6 months to comply with the current regulations.

Now you have a way to organize everything practically, but you still have no automatic help with the daily reminder of due documents. When all the tickets you require have been created, the next step is to focus on automations. We have a special trick for you for this!

Use automations to make work easier!

Automations take on repetitive work that is easily forgotten in everyday life, but is absolutely necessary in order to correctly map and carry out a process. Jira Automations works for you here, and you can devote yourself to the content without having to think about setting clicks and data. And that’s exactly what we want to achieve at this point: So that you don’t have to check each individual expiry date of the evidence in the form of tickets, you should configure an automation for this.

The automation requirements should be as follows: It should check the list of tickets daily for their expiration dates. If the expiry date has not yet been reached, the ticket can remain in the respective status. Once the expiry date has been reached, a new ticket should automatically be created and given the status “open”. The old ticket is then moved to the “Expired” status. So you only have to check the tickets with the status “Open” on a daily basis and request and attach new evidence. As soon as you have attached a proof to the ticket, you can move it back to the corresponding status.

Your benefits at a glance

• Automatic creation of tickets through import options

• Immediate status overview using the Kanban board

• Reliable reminders of expired evidence

• Access restriction to protect personal data

• Systematic documentation to make it easy to find evidence

• Automatic deletion after 6 months

As you can see, a wide variety of scenarios can be implemented and individually customized with Jira. The solution described here is of course only one of many options that Jira offers you to deal efficiently with such new requirements.

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Be aware that you likely breach German law when storing health information of employees in Jira Cloud.  Health information has special protection under German law, and I would strongly recommend to talk to legal before making this information available in any cloud software.

Even for US health data, Jira Cloud has no HIPAA compliance at this moment.