Lost in Jirvana
Jira Won’t Make You Agile
Jira Tickets: Are you using them correctly?
After a few years of working in IT, Jira has been following me around for quite a while. But never in the last 11 years have I really seen the proper use of Jira ticketing.
Can you please check Ticket XYZ-123, its been overdue since 2 months.
I created a ticket did you read it yet?
Without a Jira ticket, I cannot do anything!
How often have you heard or even said those phrases and questioned the whole tool in general?
How one of those incorrect Jira processes would look like:
An urgent issue arises, we create the necessary ticket.
After a few hours of no response, you walk to the specific department, telling you to send them an e-mail.
You walk back and send an email with the Jira ticket content. After a few days of waiting on a response or fix, you finally get the e-mail confirming the fix.
A few weeks pass and you will be visited by your manager asking you about the unclosed overdue tickets in Jira.
Of course you care about your year-end bonus, so you comply. You take the e-mail response and put it in the ticket, which is still assigned to Nirvana and close the ticket.
Issue solved!
Plan, track, and manage your agile and software development projects in Jira. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and release great software.
With the description from Atlassian, this tool will save your IT department chaos and create value & visibility in seconds after company wide implementation.
Using Jira just for the sake of putting it on your CV or stackshare.io page, just adds another overhead layer on top of everything. Without it your employees will at least talk to each other and know who to go to in case of issues.
Now I don’t want to rant against Jira itself here. I really think it can help provide a better collaboration in company with spread out departments.
Especially in times like these, where multiple people work from home or other offices, tools like Jira can really help sort and document IT requests.
But for that we all have to use those tools properly, for that to happen we need to have the right mindset and see the value this can bring.
A few steps into the right direction:
- Train & inform all the parties involved in the process involving Jira
- Accountability, if the ticket is assigned to you, take care of it. Comment, move to the respective column, change the date, etc.
- Document on what you did inside the ticket, what solution was provided, what kind of issues did you encounter, relate to other similar tickets
“i resolved the issue by …”
“this issue was raised before, linking it to ticket XYZ-652” - Reassign to the next party involved, with a comment on what you expectations are.
“please test”
“please clarify what you mean with …”
Tools don’t make you agile, mindsets do!
Jira and similar tools are made to provide visibility and clarity about your IT requirements, which helps you plan and act to your project needs.
That being said, this is specific for IT requests across different departments.
I’ve had good experiences of Jira being used internally in a Scrum team for having a proper planning and overview of Sprints, Epics, etc.
Happy collaborating!
