Using Jira to consolidate, capture, and contextualize feedback

Dan Duett

I'd like to use Jira to improve how my team captures and contextualizes requested features and improvements.

Here's our current approach:

• Direct customer feedback is contained within its own Jira project and issue type.

• Indirect customer feedback and internal ideas are scattered across Desk.com, Gainsight, Jira backlog, Slack, and email. This is insanely ineffective.

Here's what I'd like to see:

• All indirect customer feedback and internal ideas are in Jira.

• Each underlying idea/request has its own Jira issue.

• We track which customers have requested what: if we build a requested feature, we know exactly whom to notify. If we can't associate multiple customers with an underlying issue, we create a special issue type unique to each customer request and associate each customer-specific request with the underlying issue.

Any ideas on better approaches within Jira?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

This is probably more of a procedural and training question than a JIRA one.   JIRA can support everything you've defined there off-the-shelf, and easily, so the short answer is "get the users to do it in JIRA instead of <whatever>"

I'd start with a look at why they're using other routes.  Make them read-only with a goal of shutting them down in the long run, so that users have to use JIRA.  Get your teams into the habit of doing nothing unless there's a request or update in JIRA.  Where you can't shut down a route for new stuff to arrive, integrate the data flow into JIRA, so that update in system X is reflected in JIRA (and vice versa)