Agile Jira projects: prioritize what matters

[#1]

How to build a"low effort - high impact" Jira story report with Excel 

All agile teams know the value of adaptive planning and quick response to change. While there are many tools and strategies that help you evaluate and prioritize - and reprioritize - your work, one you can always count on is "impact vs. effort."

Whether you are assessing your own tasks or your team's, the concept is pretty much the same: organize activities based on the effort required and the potential impact they will have. Nobody wants to spend their precious time and resources focusing on tasks that take a lot of development hours yet deliver very little return or not desired by customers.

Let's consider a simple matrix using JMCF-powered fields (by Innovalog, the company I work for) and Midori's Better Excel Exporter  - this app makes it super easy to build it in Excel and is available for purchase (and a free trial) on the Atlassian Marketplace. 

Those types of reports can take on different forms, depending on what type of decision-making data and tools you have at your disposal. One way to approach this in Jira is to calculate votes across all tasks linked to the story and then compare it to the estimate required to perform all those tasks combined. 

Calculating 'effort' could be complicated, but for the sake of the example, let's consider that you already have a system in place that records your current "time estimate." Using JMCF, you can create useful fields that help you get the insights you need for this type of analysis. 

Use Jira Misc Custom Fields (JMCF) to calculate:

• The total vote count across all linked tasks;
• The total time estimate of the tasks linked to, in this case, high priority user stories;
• The ratio of those two.

This report is exported using Midori's Better Excel Exporter.

Then visualize your data - build the bubble chart to see which stories would create the highest value within the shortest period of development time.​

Using JMCF, you can calculate values in custom fields. These fields are searchable and support statistics. While you can display your JMCF-powered insights in your dashboards, you can perform much more sophisticated data operation in Excel after exporting it using Better Excel Exporter for Jira. 

Relevant links: 

Better Excel Exporter for Jira

Jira Misc Custom Fields (JMCF)

[M Amine]

Great apps.