Effective usage of Jira

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See Through Your Client’s Eyes

Understanding the client’s perspective when interacting with the platform will help to improve user experience. Oftentimes, it can be frustrating, confusing, and overwhelming for customers to access large boards. Jira, as a project management tool, can be very overwhelming. Make sure your best practices are not only for your internal teams but implemented for your client communication as well.

Depending on their network connectivity and the device they access from, large boards can be difficult to render. Knowing how your clients are accessing your platform will help to meet their needs. Tailoring your platform to function within your clients’ typical methods of communication will help to elevate and improve the overall user experience for your clients. Adding the extra consulting layer to client communication separates your efforts from the competition.

Your Team is Unique, Why Isn’t your System?

Large teams can often have subsequently large boards, which can create delays when rendering important reports in real-time. Understanding the dynamic between team members and the work they produce will help to customize boards to fit their needs.

Creating sub-team boards off of large team projects promotes heightened visibility and awareness of problems as they arise. This allows Project Managers to see the project overview through an aggregate board of “Stories” from all sub-team boards. The visibility of workflow issues can also be elevated through the use of heavy-handed implementation of unique customization.

For example, adding strong customization to Swimlanes can promote critical or unassigned issues to top priorities when processing through a workflow.

Utilizing Jira’s Swimlanes

“Jira Swimlanes” is one of the more underutilized tools within Jira. Swimlanes are a separate collection of issues in Active Sprints, Scrum Boards, or Kanban Boards. Swimlanes help categorize and distinguish tasks from other workstreams, users, or application areas. They are displayed horizontally, separately from the main board, for ease of visibility.

Separating a determined collection of issues, assets, stories, epics, etc into a swimlane ensures that your issues are not getting lost within the overall project. This can be specifically helpful when you’re looking to separate out issues assigned to you, separating stories from issues, or keeping epics separate from each other.

Break Down Large Workflows

Many Jira users often place Quick Filters on larger boards to monitor their complex workflows. Jira’s Quick Filter function chunks larger boards into smaller subsets of issues to deliver closer inspection of only relevant issues.

It is important to look across various Quick Filters that have been set in Jira in order to simplify large workflow boards. If the same or similar issues appear across multiple Quick Filters, it might be time to create a separate board.

Creating a separate board in Jira breaks down large workflows into smaller, more manageable boards. This helps to increase the relevancy of issues within a workflow and evokes a more in-depth focus on pertinent issues. A simple way to clean up inactive issues is to utilize the Jira Query Language, known as JQL, to search issues under “time since last update” to understand which issues are underutilized or irrelevant within your board. Learning JQL for quick searches will speed up your processes and improve overall Jira navigation.

Implementing Agile development across your enterprise is very important when trying to keep up to date with advancing technology standards. As your company grows, institute system processes that will scale with you.

I hope you find this article useful, and I would love to read your comments about how you guys effectively utilizing Jira features!!

[Aishwarya Rajendra]

Woah! This Article is really helpful!

Thanks @Sandesh Shetty  :) :) 

Best Regards,

Aishwarya R K