Best way to measure work

Question

Hello.

My team and I do routine (weekly, monthly) tasks and some development tasks for new features in dashboards or data collecting during the week in these weekly, monthly tasks. We want to start measuring all the work done by each person.

I was thinking to do Epics, Tasks and Subtasks but was told by a colleague that subtasks do not get pulled in when measuring all the work done in an Epic.

I am not sure if we qualify as a sprint team because we aren't exactly doing new development every week. I believe the measurement of work done would be done at the end of the month or every 2 weeks.

I am thinking about doing Epics to separate the individual responsibilities and Stories for specific work items being done in these individual responsibilities?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Eduardo Anflor - MindPro · Answer

Hi, @Diana Tkachenko

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Based on your description, your team works within pre-defined time-based activities, right? Do they log time in Jira to measure their work? Do you need to measure how much they are working on each activity and for each team? If you could put your activities in a kind of delivery plan/project, do you believe this better represents your work today?

I am asking this because Mindpro Deliver can fit this scenario. The app allows you to create plans, establish how teams participate in each initiative, and track the worklogs users enter, calculating the progress based on that (Planned x Actual). It also allows you to inform the team the user is logging time for, and also calculate the costs involved in the activities.

Do you believe this can help in your scenario?

Regards,

Eduardo

Danut M _StonikByte_ · Answer

Hi @Diana Tkachenko,

You could create epics, with tasks & stories and sub-tasks to better organize your work. Or, you could simply leave the tasks as they are and try to create the work report based on them, by assignee.

Jira has a Two Dimensional Filter Statistic gadget that allows you to see stats by Assignee and Status; thus giving you an idea of how many tickets every team member got done.

If you want something more advanced and efficient, you could search on Atlassian Marketplace for a plugin.

If you consider the option of using a plugin, our Great Gadgets app offers a Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget that can be really helpful. It can split the data by assignee, can display progress at the epic level (including the sub-tasks), can calculate percentages - just as in Excel. And all will be in real-time (no Jira data export is needed).

Danut.

John Funk · Answer

Yes, that seems like a good route to go. You can create an automation rule that will create the stories/tasks when the Epic is created. And if you wanted to, you could even automate the process of creating the Epic. That would be two rules and the rule that creates the Tasks would need to have the check box on the rule details page to allow other rules to trigger this one.

Here is an article that would help you if you wanted to automate the creation of the Epic when an Epic is closed.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Creating-a-Flexible-Recurring-Task-Issue/ba-p/2040862

You could even create a 3rd rule that closes the Epic when all of the children are closed. Just be sure to also check the box for the rule that auto creates the Epic so that could be triggered by the 3rd rule.