Jira reports for business analysts

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"Business analysts will tell the story of what's happening in the business today." – said  Gwen Britton. But before any insights are gained and discussed, analysts need to get and process vast amounts of data. There are various sources and tools to boost analytics. Here we’ll explore how reports in Jira can do the job for business analysts.

What is the role of a business analyst?

Business analysts cooperate closely with the product owner to provide value to project stakeholders. By tackling business difficulties, they also improve their knowledge and abilities. Business analysts also help their team members improve their analytical skills and learn new skills like testing and coding.

A business analyst's key responsibilities can be split down into the following parts.

Tools/reports for business analysts in Jira

By understanding the purpose, prioritizing the stories, and ensuring a full description of the solution, business analysts in Jira aid the team in grooming the product backlog.

There are three main activities you can do in Jira. Let’s look at what tools you can use.

1) Planning: Jira allows sprint planning, the generation of user stories and issues, and task distribution. 

• Built-in tools for planning: Jira Roadmap, Jira Control Chart
• Solutions from the Marketplace: Tempo Planner, BigPicture

2) Tracking: Jira provides a clear perspective of the team's activities. The tool gives a clear approach to tracking workflow progress and prioritizing daily activities.

• Issue tracking (with issue navigator simple or advanced with JQL; tracking past activities with Issue History) 
• Time tracking (with plugins like Tempo Timesheets, Clockwork)

3) Reports: Jira has a lot of reports, including its dashboard. At each stage of a project, managers need a clear grasp of the budget and progress.

• Sprint Report, Burndown Chart, Velocity Chart
• eazyBI Reports and Charts for Jira, Dashboard Hub for Jira

How to create a historical report in Jira

Historical data refers to information gathered regarding past events, actions, and effects involving a specific organization or entity. Businesses, analysts, and investors use historical data to provide a baseline for conducting competitive analysis and anticipating overall market and industry trends.

So, to tell the story of what’s happening in business today, or what can happen in the future, the business analyst needs to investigate past activities.

In Jira, you can do it with issue history on a single issue level. The data you can acquire is what was changed, when and by whom. For example, some assignee changed the status from TO DO to IN PROGRESS 2 hours ago.

Built-in options have no possibility to create a report or export the historical data. The option you can use to organize data the way you want is Issue History for Jira. It’s a customizable journal for every past company’s activity.

Issue history report [example]:

1. Filter issues by Assignee, Label, Project, Sprint, JQL, etc.

2. Select the date range (predefined or custom)

3. Add custom or standard fields to the table using the ‘Columns’ menu to manipulate output data.

Also, you can export an issue history report to analyze it deeper via analytical systems.

It’s a great database to audit teamwork generally or have a quick look at the daily activity per member.

Takeaway

A business analyst will find almost endless amount of reports and tools to try in Jira (built-in or plugins). It will help to figure out what went wrong, what could be better, or which measure isn't reporting as it should. 

If you’re looking for descriptive analysis, check out the reporting options of Issue History for Jira.