Jira, a highly customisable and collaborative software, can be used in a variety of ways to assist your team with their project management. Based on Agile principles, this Atlassian tool works hand-in-hand with your team to deliver on your project needs. Wondering how your team can use Jira’s capabilities to their advantage? We’ve written this helpful blog analysing some of Jira’s best project management functions and outlining how your team can implement them.

What is Jira?

Although Jira started as an IT tool, it now supports project management within a wide variety of departments, ranging from HR to Finance and Sales. Jira allows teams to track issues, which act as single work items that are designated to members of your team. By splitting tasks into issues, your team is able to keep track of progress and identify any potential roadblocks along the way.

How can your team start or improve their project management workflows with Jira?

With the mass of functions available, your team might find it intimidating to first start using Jira for their project management needs. However, this software is very intuitive, even offering templates as a means for your team to configure their projects according to their needs. Jira also offers your team the ability to employ a project plan according to their departmental needs, such as time-based project for teams in Sales departments, in addition to iterative projects needed by software teams. Creating issues within Jira allows you to plan and set out tasks, and even create smaller sub-tasks that can be assigned to teammates. These issues can be further classified through the use of epics - a feature that describes a group of issues that relate to the same, larger body of work. With the advanced project planning features, your issues can be organised according to priority, allowing your team to create a comprehensive plan.

What functions does Jira have to offer?

Workflows

One of Jira’s main functions are the customisable workflows it offers to allow your team to organise their processes. Within a Jira workflow, you can track your issues from creation to completion, allowing you to control the set of rules that your issues follow as they transition through different work stages. During this time, your team has complete control of how the issue behaves as it moves through the lifecycle, including the ability to add automations to repetitive processes. Workflows also encourage effective communication within the team through the ability to add statuses and updates.

Filters and automations

Jira offers a plethora of advanced filtering capabilities designed to save you and your team time and make your workflow more effective. By taking advantage of the detail you can add into your issues, your team can benefit further down the line by filtering through a variety of information, such as assignees, due date and epics. Furthermore, Jira offers a wide range of automations designed to make your project more manageable. These automations are carried out according to rules set by you and your team, meaning that you can customise them directly to the needs of your project.

Visualise progress

Through a wide variety of templates, your team can easily visualise progress in order to gain a better understanding of the project workflow. This also allows the team to identify any patterns that have caused roadblocks in the past and amend their workflow for more efficiency in the future. Through this, Jira also provides teams with visual reports that provide valuable insights into their project process. By using this functionality, the team is able to analyse roadblocks and gain deeper knowledge into how their project typically functions.

What’s next for Jira?

Despite already having a multitude of features at your disposal, Jira is constantly looking to improve your user experience. Recently, a new feature has been introduced where users can change the workflow, or issue type, of a request type. In addition to this, Jira administrators can now create a customisable announcement banner that is displayed to the users in their instance. Users can also look forward to the opportunity of using custom domains in their cloud site, a feature that is currently under works by Atlassian.

As a highly customisable software, Jira has a lot to offer your team and their specific project needs. If you would like to find out more about how your team can get started with Jira, get in touch, our expert team can answer any questions you may have!