Four Steps to Mastering Large Projects in Jira – Part 2

After steps 1 and 2 in our last blog post where we established a sound basis for your Jira project, we now dive into the data and show how you can unleash its power.

Step 3 – Monitor your data and raise awareness

The next step is to ensure that your data is of the highest possible quality. To do this, you will need to raise awareness among your project colleagues. Guidelines were a first step, but they are not enough. They do not guarantee that issues are opened correctly, updated, and closed thoroughly. But you can ensure that people have visibility of issues in Jira at three different levels: individual, team and project. There are several ways to create these views:

• At the individual level: We create a dashboard called “My Personal Dashboard”. This dashboard displays small coloured boxes that are gadgets for filtering results such as “My Stories in Testing”, “My Bugs”, “My Open Tasks”. The filters are based on a simple parameter in JQL queries: “assignee = currentUser()” or “creator = currentUser()”. The user can then see on a single page all the issues they are working on or the current status of the issues they have opened. We recommend that all team members use this dashboard as a daily driver for their project work.
• At team level: We create filters for our team leaders and ask them to subscribe to them. These filters are, for example, clean-up filters: when new stories are opened but an important field is missing, the team leader receives an email with the results of the filter. They can also set it up to send them an email once a week with their clean-up tasks.
• At the project level: For this high-level view, we strongly recommend an add-on for Jira called Structure, which is one of the most popular add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace. It allows you to visualise the issues you want to see in a hierarchical way. You can drag-and-drop to prioritise issues, create custom formulas to calculate KPIs, and most importantly, reduce complexity by audience at the click of a button. Like Excel, but fully integrated and always live. We will be publishing an article on this topic soon to give you our best practices for Structure.

You can use these tools to encourage your colleagues to be proactive by giving them visibility of what is going on. They will no longer be blind to the work they need to do, and they will no longer be drowning in complicated JQL queries or outdated Excel exports to find the information they need.

Step 4 – Report and share findings directly in Jira

Reporting and sharing progress is not just important for project managers. Everyone needs to know where we are in the project: Where have we fallen behind? Where are we making progress? To illustrate this, we need reliable data. Sharing clear dashboards shows everyone why it is so important to be as accurate as possible with the data in Jira. It establishes a common goal, a mutual understanding – and convinces even developers to see Jira as an essential part of their work, rather than an “administrative overhead”.

As always, you can use different tools to show the big picture, but the right choice depends on your goal. For example, if you want to view statistics about bugs, you can use the dashboards and gadgets that Jira provides out of the box. You can also use powerful data analysis plug-ins such as eazyBI to display more complex charts over time. Or, if you want to show the progress of your epics, highlight bottlenecks and visualise dependencies, we recommend using Structure as described above.

We hope these steps have given you some insight into how to operationalise and support large projects in Jira. If you have any questions or would like us to go on a rescue mission for your Jira, please contact us via our contact form or simply reach out to us via our LinkedIn profile. We look forward to hearing from you!