Project weekly meeting with JIRA

hast40 November 12, 2017

Hello,

We are using Excel to manage tasks of our projects (industrial project). We've planned to switch to JIRA as Excel is not very friendly, and the number of tasks is too important. We will also customize JIRA to add specific fields, manage deliverables of Milestones......

We have a weekly meeting to review status of the project with all departments involved in the project (manufacturing, engineering...): how can we do this meeting with JIRA ? how can we write the minutes ?

Filter the tasks that are late or due this week, review them during the meeting and add live comments or update status ? or let the people update their tasks before the meeting and just review the status during the meeting ?  The minutes of the meeting would be a copy/paste of the tasks reviewed during the meeting ?

Any suggestions ?

Thanks for your help,

 

2 answers

1 vote
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 12, 2017

Most Atlassian users would use Confluence to record meetings (albeit doing specific issue updates in Jira), as there's a meetings template for doing exactly this.

A lot of us record meetings in Jira as tasks so we can log time against them, but some people do indeed take all the meeting notes into issues of type "meeting". 

If you're highly Jira-centred during your meetings it probably does make more sense to use Jira.  I'd be doing things like saying "Agenda is these 7 issues" and using issue links like "discuss in meeting" to point to them.  Not sure I'd bother minuting the parts of the meeting that get the issues updated during the meeting though, as the link and updates in issues tells people you did something.

hast40 November 12, 2017

Ok thank you: yes i've planned to send an agenda before the meeting with the list of tasks to be reviewed.

For the minutes, do you mean that the minutes are generally written directly in Jira as a type "task" or as a specific type "meeting" ?

Thanks

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 12, 2017

The last place I visited that using Jira for meetings had a host of structural stuff around it.  They had a specific type of issue for meetings.  You'd create a meeting when you knew you needed one, with

  • Attendees (proposed)
  • Date and time
  • Agenda written into the description (although one line would be "discuss linked issues" rather than a list of issues)
  • Links to issues

Attendees would then add links if they had issues to discuss and then the updates during and after the meeting were

  • A text box for minutes
  • A sub-task for each time someone got a task to do (e.g. Dave to look at three linked issues, Alice to go talk to the client, Marcia still hasn't done her timesheets, etc)
A_Raadls October 12, 2018

Nic, I am trying to do something similar to what you suggest.  Is it correct to say that the subtasks in this case were used to dole out tasks in the meeting because unlike linked issues, they can be created on the issue itself, which in this case is of the type "meeting?"  We were going to do that, however, one thing that we've come up on is that the subtasks, by virtue of the fact that they must relate to the project of the issue, may not be about other Projects.  In our case, the meeting could stray to cover other projects, so that would mean if we log subtasks during the meeting, there are some minuses here:

- having to go back and reassign the subtasks to the correct projects.  I can't think of a way to do this other than first converting to a task, then moving to the appropriate project.

- losing the record that the subtask was discussed in that meeting, since the issue for the meeting itself will "lose" the subtasks once they are moved out to another project. 

One idea we had is to use Epics for the meetings, and simply label them as "meetings."  We then can use the features of Jira to report, track, etc. which is a major benefit over using Confluence for the meetings.  Then, since in Epics you can create tasks, we can easily during the meeting in-flight add the tasks, in the appropriate projects, and leave them permanently attached to the Epic so the record of them being discussed remains intact.

I'd be curious if you see any drawback in this approach.  Many thanks in advance for your time if you choose to answer this!

Colinda Goormans-Francke January 15, 2020

A Raadls, I am looking into this subject and what you suggest sounds good to me. Did you implement it in the meanwhile? Or did you find any drawbacks?

A_Raadls January 15, 2020

Hi @Colinda Goormans-Francke

To answer your question, I have long since given up on this.  Got no response from Nic, and I have all but quit Atlassian due to the limitations of Jira to handle this.  I used this method for many months, but there are a ton of flaws:

- subtasks can't disconnect from issues, so you are stuck with the subtask doled out in the meeting being forced to relate to the meeting, when in reality they generally refer to other pieces of work.

- Jira stubbornly does not allow multiple assignees, so without the expensive add on Tempo Timesheets, and a lot of manual work on top of that, there is no way to track time of all attendees of the meeting.

- Epics do not work well as they really aren't flexible enough to handle this need, and also are forced into projects.  So you'd have all your meetings in a project where the Epics are.  I didn't want to create a placeholder project called "meetings" with a bunch of meeting epics, that is a terrible workaround and waste of a project.

I have moved on to the no code solutions that are in the market now since I wrote that, I highly encourage you to give them a look as they can handle meetings and so much more than Jira, which is languishing with slow development and a half-baked status between trying to develop Next-Gen, but having most key features still stuck in Classic.  

These tools are tons better and can all handle meetings terrifically:

- Notion.so

- Coda.io

- Fibery.io

- Clickup

I even recently tried a new tool RoamResearch.com that is great for relating tasks and properly taking notes during a meeting that flows from topic to topic.  

Hope that's helpful, despite my cynicism.  Sorry I am at this point done with Atlassian - tried for years to see if some key features I was hoping for would actually get developed.  They are too bloated and too arrogant to care though - leaving most development to the range of shaky 3rd party apps.

All the best.

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Colinda Goormans-Francke January 16, 2020

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply.
For us it is desirable that there is only one assignee as then it is clear who takes the responsibility on the task. We have a field team members in which we mention others involved in the task and I can log time on an issue for which I am not assignee so maybe that has changed since the last time you tried?

I think I don't give up yet on the idea. 
I will create an epic e.g. for the Executive Committee in our Top management project and then I create a task in the epic of type minutes for each meeting. If there are small tasks to do by the members of the committee, we add them as sub-tasks. If it is something in another project we can use a linked issue and that issue can be of any type or in any project.

The only thing I would need to do to make it easier to work with, is to add in the sub-task panel the due date and for the issue links the due date and the assignee.

A_Raadls January 16, 2020

Hi @Colinda Goormans-Francke  again!

That sounds like you've thought through this and come up with some creative workarounds.  Part of the reason I left Jira was exactly to avoid doing that.  If your team isn't fully invested in Jira, I recommend these other tools.  If you are doing all this work in the first place, you are probably technically good enough to take a tool like Coda, which is a true no code powerhouse, and mold it to your needs with no need for workarounds!

Understood re: only one assignee, that is desirable at times, but I was trying to use the meeting issue type to represent the entire meeting, and there was more than one person in it!  

I am not aware of any way to log time for another user natively in Jira, unless you use Tempo Timesheets.  If you google "Jira log time for another user" you will see this is discussed as the only solution to this problem.  Tempo however does some funny stuff - it does not handle remaining estimates for issues the same way Jira does natively, so you then have to set up yet another workaround for that problem!

Again in Coda, you can see within subtasks all the details you'd like - assignee, due date, summary, description, etc.  In a subtask panel in Jira - are you referring to a board? - you will see minimal info.  No chance to see the description, just the summary.  

I would not be comfortable with trying to force an Epic to represent a "committee" in my system.  A Committee is a team, and in these other apps, you can have a record-type that is for a team behave like a team!  Include users, have team attributes, etc.  

I have set up in my experimentation in Notion, Fibery, and Coda excellent meeting solutions that "feel like" meetings.  These all handle development beautifully as well. Coda has a great Jira integration, too.  If you are stuck in Jira, and you need a roadmap solution, or can consider integrations, I'd recommend you look at Coda as a possible tool you use 'on top' of Jira.

But all in all I'd recommend you look at these other solutions for all your needs.  A few hours invested in researching them can reveal a host of possibilities to improve your workflow and effectiveness.  As of about the last 2 years these tools have really evolved, and there is no need to limit oneself to Jira for this type of thing anymore!

Hope that is useful and I wish you luck!  Tracking meetings was one of the things I really wanted to solve in Jira!

Markus Glaser February 25, 2020

Hello,

I'm working for an larger tech-company and we have started to roll-out Jira as main tool for task mgmt and we also got Confluence, quasi, as a side car without any recommendation for usage. We were playing around a bit and now also found a way to implement Epics for meeting agendae (without knowledge of the discussion here ;) ).

We are combining Confluence and Jira in the following way (our notes are always project-related) to keep track on topics that span several meetings:

  • Meeting Minutes on Confluence with a customized template, usage similar to native template:
    • Benefit of having dedicated Confluence page for referencing
    • Attendees/Informed
    • List of discussed Epics (via Jira macros added)
    • Possible to take further additional notes during meeting which may not be related to specific Epic, or if no Epic exists yet (stressful meeting situation!)
  • The "Description" field of the Jira Epic is then used for notes per regular meeting by entering date, discussion, horizontal bar.
    • All other Epic features are used as well (Issues in Epic, discussion in Comments instead of per email, linked Confluence pages,...)
  • A dedicated Confluence page holds the overview on all agenda items (similar to classical Excel lists, but without its restrictions) by using the Jira macro:
    • JQL query to display all not closed Epics of specific project
    • Columns are Epic Name, Link, Assignee, Follow-up date, etc., _as well as_ the Description (which holds the discussion per regular meeting to this topic)

This way we are able to keep the Epic as the central node for all information to a specific issue, and it is easily possible to gather information on old topics without digging through issues/emails/skype communication. Furthermore, the entry point for searching this information can be from the Confluence meeting minutes page, via Jira issues, via the Epic overview table on the Confluence page → all leading to the same point, i.e. the Epic.

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Maccc m July 12, 2018

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