BPM for Jira Cloud: How to optimize business processes in Jira

[#1]

How much time (and money) do you lose on recurring tasks? According to The Anatomy of Work Index report, employees spend roughly 60% of their time on "work about work". Routine tasks hinder the company's productivity. No matter what industry you work in, there are always repeatable activities that someone calls boring processes, but they are commonly known as business processes. These include employees or clients onboarding, pulling and finding data, preparing contracts, filing documents, etc. To minimize repetitive processes, eliminate errors, and lower operating costs, companies adopt automation technology. Let's look at what Business Process Management is and how Jira can help with organizing monotonous work.

1. What is Business Process Management (BPM) and why it matters

A business process is a set of regular steps that must be followed to achieve a specific business goal. Analyzing and trying to improve each of those processes is where Business Process Management (BPM) starts. BPM answers what, when, why, how work is done, and who handles it.

 

Why it's vital to manage business processes:

• To reduce the time on routine tasks
• To unite people and departments around the process
• To minimize the risk of skipping essential functions
• To reduce human errors and miscommunication
• To get transparent monitoring of processes

BPM techniques enable you to determine how frequently a task is completed and how long it takes to finish the process, allowing you to determine your business's overall cost and value.

2. How to organize business processes in Jira Cloud 

Now let's move to Jira and what tools are available here to optimize your processes. If you're on the Cloud version, check out the following methods.

2.1. Automation for Jira Cloud

Jira automation is a built-in option you can use for free. You can automate your work with issues, track and manage your automation activities, create a more complex than defaulted workflow. For beginners, it may take some time to organize everything properly. Learn more on automation of process management. 

One of the pitfalls is limits to the number of requests. When setting up several types of automation for different departments, at some point, the automation may stop altogether, which can negatively affect the Jira workflow. Besides, it does not allow to optimize process completely, only some parts of work.

2.2. Free add-ons from outside parties

You can create automation rules to integrate and automate your processes through repositories. E.g., Bitbucket and Jira integration allows automating tedious tasks.

2.3. Marketplace add-ons

• Add-ons that allow you to create form templates and choose which form to insert into the issue when creating it (e.g., ProForma: Forms & Checklist for Jira). But it's easy to become lost in a sea of forms, and you need to establish each assignment from scratch and manually selected the form.
• Add-ons that enable users to create templates for individual tasks. As mostly all processes in the company consist of more than one task, it can be convenient only in the case of a small number of repetitive processes.
• Add-ons that let you construct task templates with subtasks (e.g., Issue Templates for Jira. If you'd like to monitor each running process in real-time, you need to check other solutions.
• Add-ons that allow you to create a process template and start it when needed (e.g., Business Process Manager).

3. Example of creating business process with BPM

SaaSJet team has developed Business Process Manager to make each of the recurring processes handy and team-friendly. You need no extra knowledge or studies to manipulate the application. The whole process includes all the necessary tasks to run it.

To better understand how it works, let's try to create an Employee Background Check process template. Background checks on applicants and employees are an excellent method to discover potential problems that could damage your organization. A critical factor in successful verification is standardization and following the stages.

Steps to follow on managing processes:

1. Start on the template

After installing the add-on, you'll have a standard Employee Background Check template available. So, to run the process, click the Start button.

2. Edit the template according to your needs

Add steps to personalize the process for your company. 

3. Create tasks for the person in charge and in the right group

Collaborate with different people and departments around your process. 

4. Monitor processes in the real-time

Once the process runs, you can watch the progress and keep everything under control.

5. Get an archive of all running processes in this template to check Employee Background

6. Edit anytime you need

Make changes instantly as soon as you need to. The changes will be active when you start the next process.

7. Manage access rights

Create processes that will be visible only to people who need them. Access rights securely protect all data.

Takeaway

Performing the same task over and over again leads to employees' lower productivity, frequent errors, and poor work quality. That's why it's so important to estimate your workflow and choose the most appropriate tool to optimize your business processes. Try Business Process Manager created by SaaSJet Team and share your experience here. 

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Thanks for sharing. Just for clarity, is a business process similar to the familiar Jira workflow steps? Would I be able to create a business process with a linear sequence of workflow steps?

[Julia Shcherbyna _SaaSJet_]

Hi @Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_

Not really. By Jira Workflow, users can create statuses transition template for a particular project.
In the BPM Add-on, you can create the list of forms or checklists that will be assigning to the right person as a typical Jira issues. One form = one issue. Moreover, you can create them in different projects in one run.
Once you prepared all the needed forms and started them as a process, you will be able to control it's completion.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hi @Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_ / @Julia Shcherbyna _SaaSJet_ ,

Very interresting! Finally an addon to help me satisfy my BPM flows :) I'll definitely dive in to it more. I'm still amazed at how little marketplace apps are actually focussing on a workflow within a workflow system.

If right now you have for example an Onboarding request you need to use subtasks or complex automation rules to build a resemblance of a flow.

Are you considering also a DC version?

[Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_]

@Dirk Ronsmans thanks for your comments.

We're happy that our solution feeds your needs :)

Due to the fact that the application is new, in the near future, we plan to add more features to the Cloud Version to make it more useful. But if we will continue to receive requests for the Data Center version, we will add it to the roadmap.