How Can Linked Checklist Templates Help With a Jira Audit?

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Businesses often have numerous recurring procedures demanding precise and meticulous execution. The Finance team must adhere to specific steps during payroll to ensure compliance with regulations. Support agents are tasked with collecting pertinent details for each client-submitted issue. IT faces multiple security, privacy, and data residency considerations before entrusting a vendor with infrastructure support.

Yet, amidst these responsibilities, how can one guarantee strict adherence to these processes?

The challenge of maintaining consistency in recurring processes

A simple checklist is one of the most efficient solutions for ensuring consistency across one’s tasks. It’s much harder to miss something important when you are following a clear ToDo list. 

Still, most of the recurring processes that are required to run projects successfully are complex enough to demand multiple Jira issue templates - each with individual subtasks and checklists. 

And even then, simply having something in Jira doesn’t necessarily mean the process is set in stone. Teams can change and adapt their workflows. It’s only natural that some of your task descriptions and ToDo’s are dynamically shifting as your business grows. 

• But what if a process does not allow even the slightest change? 
• What if you are compelled to do certain tasks regularly and in an orderly fashion by a regulator? 
• What if your regulated process evolves, and you need to make some centralized changes?
• And how can you ensure the regulator is satisfied after auditing your Jira instance?

Enter Linked Templates in Smart Checklist for Jira. 

What are Linked Templates in Smart Checklist for Jira?

Linked Templates are a special kind of checklist template that is available to Smart Checklist Pro users. They are designed to give businesses the ability to set certain processes in stone while leaving the option to make or tweak certain things if the need arises. The decisionmaker (Manager, Project, or Product owner) can set these templates up once, and they will be reused automatically for every issue that meets specific conditions. 

What makes Linked Templates different from any other checklist template? 

🔗 Live Connection: Linked Templates stay connected to associated issues, ensuring instant updates and synchronization.

🔒 Immutability: Users can't make changes in the imported Linked Templates other than changing the status of checklist items.

🔄 Synchronized updates: Admins can update the original template, automatically reflecting changes across all checklists where the template is imported.

What are the key benefits of using Linked Templates in Jira?

The main appeal of a Linked Template is its immutability. An important process that you’ve set up once will remain unchanged. At the same time, the team will still have detailed steps and ToDos for their issues.  

That said, change is a natural occurrence in every growing business. Your processes are continuously being polished and perfected. However, making changes in every issue that has a template applied to it one by one is rather troublesome and extremely time-consuming. 

This is why the Linked Templates feature offers you the option to apply the changes you’ve made in a template to every issue where it is used.

How can Linked Templates help with a Jira audit?

We follow a certain philosophy when it comes to the development of our products. Our teams tend to build the features if we can validate their usefulness. The Smart Checklist app itself was born from an internal need. 

For example, Linked Templates can be quite beneficial when it comes to undergoing a Jia audit for a specific security compliance certification. These kinds of certifications often require such activities as: 

• Regular Access Control: Used to ensure that access to sensitive systems, data, and resources is properly managed and controlled. The checklist may include items such as user access reviews, privilege escalation checks, and monitoring access logs.
• Security Awareness Training: Tracks employee training and awareness activities related to cybersecurity. It includes items such as scheduled training sessions, completion status of training modules, employee acknowledgment of security policies, and periodic phishing simulation exercises.

Having a checklist is a good solution for these and similar scenarios. Simply document the processes as checklist templates and then regularly import them via automation.

Linked Templates offer an additional advantage by ensuring strict adherence to processes.

• They guarantee that the documented process remains consistent across all Jira issues. These templates are unchangeable by the user. 
• Updates can be automatically applied to all issues linked to the template if any enhancements are required to make the process more efficient.
• Each time a template is utilized, the action is recorded and can be examined. Similarly, any alterations to a linked template are also documented. These logs are available for review during audits.

How would this work in a real case?

Let’s say you are releasing a new feature. The dev team is done with the implementation. But you still need to review their work. 

1. Set up a Linked Template in a way where it is applied based on Issue Transition. This way, every time the task status changes to ‘IN REVIEW, ' a new checklist with security compliance items will be added to the issue. 
2. Now, every time an issue is moved to ‘IN REVIEW’, there will be a Security Compliance checklist. 

Pro Tip: You can mark certain checklist items as Mandatory. That way, the issue will be blocked from transitioning into a different status until all of the items are marked as done. 

Consequently, not only have we enhanced an internal process for compliance, but we have also generated the necessary logs for the auditor to verify compliance.

Would you like to know more about ways Smart Checklist can help improve your processes? Let’s talk!