How Do You Create Standards While Maintaining Buy-In for JIRA

[LeKisha Boswell]

As a JIRA administrator maintaining an instance that is considered to be the Wild Wild West can eventually become a pain point for the administrator and the user. While users want the freedom to explore, create, delete, move and transition (to name a few JIRA-related verbs), most don't want to deal with the hassle of standardizing until something breaks or just gets too clunky. I've heard "handcuffing" leads to non-participation.

There are a number of reasons standards are helpful and even necessary. For example, our teams are increasingly adopting cross-functional responsibilities that require resources to change, integrate or temporary contribute to other areas within the organization. As a result of the shared work scrum and kaban boards are configured to filter in issues from various projects which causes a hassle when workflows are not in synced. Frequently our boards display that filters are too complex which in turn causes some lost of board functionality.  

It also creates a learning curve as resources have to first learn new workflows, screens, schemes etc. In addition, our current instance caters to a small 350 users (give or take) we recently underwent a merger and there is a great chance we will more than likely triple the amount of licenses. Having standards in place upfront will help with onboarding new resources.

I may be totally bias - but that's why I got you guys to help put things into perspective. What are the benefits if any for standardizing and how can I articulate to "freedom users" those benefits?