How to see all things/requests/tasks in a project management setup

Yuri Ivanov February 13, 2020

Hi all!

We are a small team that uses JIRA Cloud for managing projects, tasks within projects, bugs or problems, and sub-tasks. 

Because of different requirements and customers we create different JIRA projects. Some JIRA projects need to be tracked for half a year and can have hundreds of issues. Some JIRA projects hold issues that last only two-three days.

Everything seems to be fine when we create epics and stories and sub-tasks in a JIRA project and work on them in a sprint. We know exactly what is going on and see where it is as long as this belongs to this particular JIRA project.

The problem is that there are many JIRA projects, each with their own issues, and once there are more than two or three active ones, we need to remember which projects we need to go to do whatever it is needed to be done. On more than one occasion we forgot that there was something we needed to address.

We try to approach it through using a filter which shows all open sprints across all JIRA projects. This works OK if issues are in a sprint, but fails if issues are in a backlog. So we have another filter which shows what is in backlogs across projects. Then, as you might imagine, we need to see issues of some other type or condition. So we keep creating filters. There are so many filters that instead of helping, they now start slowing us down..

We are looking for ideas of how to create a dashboard or organize our work ins such a way, where we can see what we have on our hands and make decisions on what to address and when.

Our JIRA dashboards list what is assigned to each of us, and list those gazillion filters, and has a calendar widget, but this is still cumbersome. I have a feeling that there is something much more elegant which allows pulling everything from various JIRA projects in some easy to see everything way. Thank you!!

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Daniel Ebers
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February 14, 2020

Hi Yuri,

that's a hot topic and I see regular discussions on this. Thanks for your thoughts - basically you named many important tools like filters and dashboards - they should provide you a thorough insight of what is going on. Same time it reads that this doesn't suffice anymore, information are overwhelming.

I am sure you also use some kind of Software Board (maybe Kanban) which can be still crowded but also flexible. Maybe this is a good point to start from?

Apart from looking at a completely different solution, for example a Calendar wigdget/App like you mentioned it might be worth a try to fine tune the dashboards. There are some great blog post around (one that comes to my mind is: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/5-steps-to-build-a-killer-dashboard).

What I often hear that it is of great help are Dashboard Gadgets that work with visuals. A Pie Chart, a Chart or something similar.

Maybe also Reports come into play to some extent. (https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/reporting-764478415.html)

Based on very specific needs I have seen several implementations which access JIRA via API and extract a set of highly customized information - maybe this is also worth a though. Dependend on how complex or specific the requirement is a programmer might be needed, though.
(https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/)

These are some general thoughts, of course. Some ideas might not be valid - based on your team structure or specific use case. But maybe you can get a first idea where to go from here.

Cheers,
Daniel

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