Four Steps to Mastering Large Projects in Jira – Part 1

If you have ever been involved in a large IT project using Jira, you may have had a similar experience: the number of issues in Jira keeps growing and it is amazingly easy to get lost in a jungle of bugs, stories, and epics. It becomes difficult to keep up to date with the project. You are getting increased duplicates, you are losing track of the status of your epics, and it is getting harder and harder to find the truth. You try to save the day by exporting a list of issues to an Excel file, making up some clumsy statistics and drawing some nice graphs, because that is what you know how to do, and management likes them. But there is a notable risk that the data will be incomplete or even wrong. In fact, your report is very likely to be out of date.

The task is not easy. Sometimes you are dealing with legacy issues created by others, sometimes the project is too big. However, there are a few simple steps you can take to make a fresh start, or if you are reading this before starting a major project, to start on a solid footing. We would like to share with you our experience and some of the actions we have identified that have helped us.

Step 1 – (Re-)work on the basics

The first question you need to ask yourself is: Is Jira the tool that everyone is working with? If you want Jira to be as efficient as possible, everyone needs to be involved and willing to work on the tool. From management to business analysts to third-party developers, they all need to access your Jira project and understand what is going on. To enable this, you need to be prepared to do two basic things: reassess the base and clean it up. You will face these two aspects several times during your project.

First, you need to be clear about the types of Jira-issues you define. Are the standard issue types and hierarchies sufficient or do we define custom types for further levels of abstraction? And remember to choose the icons carefully: one colour and one icon for each type! It may seem like an irrelevant detail, but it is crucial to help everyone to quickly understand all components which will surely grow in complexity. Second, the structure of the project and the teams must be clear and communicated. You can define this directly in Jira and have an overview of the teams in a dashboard, for example. Third, it is important to be able to find what you are looking for. Well-designed filters will help you the most. So be prepared to learn and train your JQL skills.

Step 2 – Establish clear processes and responsibilities

The larger the project, the clearer the processes and responsibilities need to be in Jira. For this step, Confluence will be your best ally: create your own section – or even your own space – where you centrally collect all official guidelines. Here are the two types of guidelines that are most popular in our projects:

• The “Delivery Process” page: Here you will find all the steps, from the need for a new feature to closing its epics and stories in Jira. You can define which types of issues are relevant for each step, what the correct status of the issues is, and who is responsible for each part of the process.
• How-to pages: These are guidelines on how to create issues in Jira correctly. They explain what the mandatory fields are, the meaning or purpose of each field, and the definition of different statuses (what does it mean when a story is “Ready for Development”?). These are simple pages, one for each type of issue, that look like a shopping list where you can tick the boxes to make sure you have provided all the required information. This also ensures a common terminology throughout the project.

We always try to share these pages as much as possible with all project colleagues. They are part of the project’s starter pack and a “must read” for new joiners.

This concludes part 1. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where we will explain how to make best use of the data in Jira for individuals, teams or project management and what add-on we have been relying on heavily.