JIRA reports without time tracking

[Az]

Hello everybody, 

We have a local JIRA instance. We have a number of projects we are managing through JIRA. 

I am a project manager and want to get more detailed reports on how tickets are doing. I do have a dashboard setup which is good to view current progress, but I'm not sure if it is the best for historical and high-level data. 

The big issue is that we do not use time-tracking. We also do not use any variation of AGILE. I had tried to introduce it and it didn't stick at all. We do have a relatively solid workflow as we track the ticket progression from creation to creative, creative review, dev, dev review, client, client review, etc. 

I was wondering if there was a way that I could simulate timetracking by creating a start/stop progress field and then get the time based on how long it spent in the 'start progress' field. I'm not sure if this could work. 

I want to know what are the best and most meaningful reports that I can create given the data that I have. Most of the ones I see are related to time tracking. 

Any information would be very helpful!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

@Az,

You could certainly gather 'time spent in status' using plugins but IMO this would be horrible data to attempt to infer anything valuable. By valuable I mean actionable. If the dev team doesn't log time and do so in a dependable way then there isn't much you can do to assess velocity, etc. 

warning...the rest of this response is opinion based upon experience.

As a project manager you need to either accept the way the team works and try to slowly invoke change or drive Agile from the top down if the bottom up isn't working. My experience is that you need someone from w/in the dev team to champion this, either a key respected team lead or the manager/director. Maybe you can get the team to start by using the estimation field but not logging time and or use the Due Date. If that is successful then introduce logging at a later time. One of the key selling points to development is that time logging helps define what the team 'can' do (velocity) so that it can be fed back into the planning of the next sprint/itteration/release vs. overbooking the team. In other words Velocity is a tool that Dev can use to their advantage.

[Az]

@Jack Brickey Unfortuantely, we are a small company and I've already talked to the team top-down and bottom-up and logging isn't happening. 

Can you please tell me what these plugin options are for gathering time spent in status. Or if there is other useful data?

[Jack Brickey]

you can search in the Marketplace and here is what I found w/ quick search.

[Az]

Thank you Jack. 

Seems like I have a lot of thinking to do on how to optimize our workflow. 

[George Mihailoff]

You can use this add-on https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218809/quantify-timespent to get spent time without time tracking. IMHO more mature team becomes in Agile fewer chances they will do manual tracking.