Using Jira Software for Business Processes (Project Management)

Ashley Woods

Hi All,

 

I'm a Programme Manager within a small-medium Software Development company. My use case is that I'm trying to centalise much of the project management activities that happen within our business into a single tool, e.g. Jira. For example, I'd like to create a issue type for Risks and Issues, then manage the relationship to actual technical tickets they impact via the linkage feature within Jira. 

 

I've seen some guidance on plug-ins, which I'm not really interested in right now as we just need something simple to get the information recorded. Initial thoughts are to just create a RISK project (RISK-1, RISK-2 as tickets) and the same for ISSUE with fields for those project tickets that replicate what you would expect to see, e.g. Likelihood, Impact, etc.

 

Question to the forum is, do you all have any insights or experiences in running many of your business processes this way via the Jira Software application? Would be great to have some examples of how it's worked well (or not well) in other places.

 

Many thanks!

Scott Theus

I've successfully set up a Kanban project to maintain the HR recruiting process where each Jira issue is a job req. If you can map out the workflow for your business process and uniquely identify the item you want to move through that process then Jira will work.  In my experience Jira works best with Agile teams, rather than either a typical waterfall project or a traditional business unit like HR where individuals are assigned work items to complete  on their own, without a lot of interaction or cross dependencies. 

My group has a number of projects with business-only issues and workflows, some of which do link to product issues as dependencies. We started setting these up by first identifying the types of problems we want to solve and then defining the workflow to solve them. 

For your Risk/Issue scenario I would suggest identifying the workflow for the risks and issues and setting up an issue type for each with the fields for impact and probability as you said. You can use those issue types within a project for project risks and outside of the product work in a business-type project. 

 

Hope this helps, 

 

Scott