Why all your people should use the same Jira reporting tool

[#1]

Let’s say you have most of the people in your company using Jira for work management. Dev and IT teams, business teams, and senior management alike. Great! You’re most of the way there in your mission to break down information silos and get everyone working cohesively.

But have you achieved a single source of truth? Not if you don’t have standardized reporting.

Why is standardized Jira reporting important?

Achieving a single source of truth is about ensuring that everyone in an organization is making decisions on the same data.

This can’t happen if everyone’s using different reporting tools. It means they’re making reports that differ in structure, design, format, units of measurement, level of detail, and how up-to-date the information is. This creates a whole slew of problems:

• Time spent reporting varies wildly from tool to tool, leading to irregularity and inconsistency in your reporting patterns

• One team’s report can’t be repeated by another because it was made in a different tool

• Reports become hard or impossible to compare with each other

• There’s a lack of integrity in the organization’s reporting, because each chart is showing the same data differently

• People come to different conclusions from the same data, or miss the most crucial message of the report

• People start to mistrust reports because they don’t know which ones contain the most up-to-date data

• Communications slow down and potentially even stop

Reports are necessary for monitoring progress and performance and improving how an organization operates. But to make the strategic difference they’re supposed to, those reports need to be presented and utilized consistently. Getting all your teams to use one tool, thereby standardizing both your approach to reporting and the structure/design of your charts, will help fuel much more meaningful discussions about strategy.

You also want everyone to be using a tool that’s fully integrated with your team’s data. If you have people using siloed reporting tools like Excel, then you’re exporting and duplicating your data and manually formatting your reports. This always carries the risk of manual error not to mention being stupidly time-consuming. It also means that your reports are immediately out of date as soon as they’re made.

So, if your teams are using Jira, you want everyone to be reporting in Jira with live data using the same Jira reporting tool.

Why the choice of reporting tool is important

If you want to get everyone using the same Jira reporting tool, it needs to be the right one.

The easiest solution would be to ask everyone to use out-of-the-box Jira reports. Unfortunately, these just aren’t good enough for telling data stories, certainly not the data stories you need to tell to drive change. The data and visualization options are too limited.

Many companies will typically turn to a powerful big data business intelligence (BI) platform instead, mistakenly believing that these tools offer the most value. The problem is that most are hugely complex and require much more effort and learning than the average Jira user has time or inclination for. As a result, only a small fraction of your people will end up using it and you’ll be back at square one.

When looking for a tool that can and will be adopted enthusiastically by everyone, prioritize user friendliness and speed of making charts above all else.

There are flexible custom reporting and data visualization add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace, such as Custom Charts for Jira, Rich Filters, and Mindpro Insights, that act as an intermediary between out-of-the-box Jira reports and big data BI tools. Tools like these have the user-friendliness of native reports without the restrictions, and the custom reporting power of the BI tools without the complexity.

If you install a tool like Custom Charts or Rich Filters on all your Jira instances, and get everyone to start using it for reporting, then all your reports will share the same structure, design, and level of detail. No one will be second-guessing what the charts are telling them. It also means that teams can share ideas on what reports to make, and help newbies from different teams understand what the charts are showing.

Ultimately, you’ll end up with more people getting more out of Jira, not wasting time and money on unnecessary extra tools.

[AG]

Agree @Berry_OldStreet_  

[Justina]

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