What are some metrics that non-tech teams can leverage, that can be captured using JIRA Kanban?

Arron Tran

I've recently introduced JIRA Kanban (Cloud) to our in-house Legal Services team. They currently love it and it really helps leadership to get better insight into how work focus is being allocated (we currently use the Components field as work "buckets" to categorize types of work as 'Strategic', 'Transactional', 'Operational', etc) so that we can better align the team with the overall strategic direction. 

What I want to ask this community is: what else do your non-tech teams use JIRA for? What insightful metrics can we get from JIRA? 

Currently, one thing we choose not to track is time, as we don't see time being a strong measure in the Legal space considering there is a highly negative connotation associated with time tracking in the Legal world and we don't want to deter engagement and weaken our culture. The only thing is, time tracking is one of JIRA's strengths in the technology/development space and we have effectively chosen not to leverage any of the time-based reporting/metrics.

 

 

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Arron Tran,

You say you introduced (Jira) kanban to your legal team. As you probably know, kanban is a methodology that focuses on improving the flow of work.

I am sure you are using a kanban board for the legal team. Just the board itself can show you where you have bottlenecks in your systems: the columns in your board (the statuses of the underlying process) where cards pile up. Those are areas in your process which are causing delay of the overall process and that should be mitigated.

With your board also come 2 major reports out of the box (I added links to the documentation, where you can read more on how to read and use the reports): 

the cumulative flow diagram

the diagram will show you the number of tasks in each status of the process over time. It helps you locate bottlenecks and steer towards the problems you might need to focus on.

the control chart

This report helps you track Lead Time and Cycle time of your work (based on selecting the appropriate statuses) and gives you a very important insight into the speed of your legal service. It basically helps you answer how fast your team is in processing different types of work and how consistent it manages this.

I am quite sure that these standard reports are really useful in terms of giving you insights into how well the process is working. And they don't involve time tracking in any way.

Apart from those, ask yourself (and your legal team) what they think are important metrics to be measured. They can be related to:

• Quality (e.g. how often do contracts need to be back and forth between parties before they get approved, ...)
• Workload (how many tasks are on each team / team member's plate, how long do they stay there, ...)
• ...