Jira Software is an agile project management software. It allows teams to organize work on boards, and manage to generate their deliveries through frameworks like Kanban or Scrum. You can also take Scrum Master Training from Simplilearn.
Jira Software was developed by Atlassian with the objective of allowing task monitoring and project monitoring, ensuring the management of all its activities in one place.
In today's article, I will explain everything you need to know about Jira Software.
1. what is Jira software?
First of all, it is important that you understand that the Jira family is composed of several solutions, the Jira Service Desk for call center teams, the Jira Core for business teams, and Jira Software for teams that wish to incorporate an agile framework.
The purpose of this article is to dive into Jira Software, okay?
Now that we're aligned on the topic of this article, let's go!
2. Why Jira Software
Teams have a daily need to conduct things from planned to do, be it in any segment: technology, legal, marketing, sales, etc. Each and every team has the need to manage their deliveries, taking them from planning to do. This is where Jira Software comes in, it allows the entire team to be aligned as to the planning of the actions to be performed through a task table (as shown in the table below).
You may have seen the similar to the table above in other solutions, but what makes Jira Software so special? I don't want to spoil the surprise of the rest of the article, but there are three main reasons why Jira Software is the best solution for managing agile projects.
- Flexibility in the process configuration (columns),
- Workflow organization,
- The reports generated according to the framework (kanban or scrum), and
- The gigantic add-ons marketplace.
3. Jira Software and process configuration flexibility
People, processes, and technology. This is the essential triad for any team to work. In a perfect world, all people are engaged and involved with the project, know the process and know what to do at each stage, and master the technology with mastery. But if you've ever been part of a team or managed it, you know that the sky isn't made of cotton and the world isn't pink.
People are not always engaged and often do not master the process, or simply, as is natural for human beings, forget. This is exactly where Jira Software comes in. It allows you to define the rules of your process, and ensure that they are respected.
For example, it is very common for agile framework teams to control WIP, and want to limit it. Imagine that your team wants there to be no more than three In-progress activities, and you really want to ensure that it doesn't happen, Jira Software supports you by preventing the fourth card from being moved to a column.
Another common need is the passing of batons between areas. Let's go to the examples again, dear reader, but don't limit yourself to them.
Imagine that a marketing team needs to pass the baton from leads to sales. But before sending them, it is necessary for him to inform things like main pains, the origin of the lead and potential products to be purchased. That is, no leads can be sent to the sales team without this information being present.
Like Jira Software, you can configure exactly that there is a validation that this information is present before the lead is sent to sales.
You can extend the example above to various relationships between teams, teams of developers and testers, support and development teams, HR teams, and technology support.
In addition to flexibility, Jira Software has very robust automation features, and you can create automation rules so that a new project opens automatically when a sale happens, or the like.
This is one of the most charming features of Jira Software, creating rules for the processes to be fulfilled.
4. Better workflow organization
Within Jira Software, processes are called workflows, which is the ability to organize workflow through an automated system. The feature allows team tasks to be divided into groups for better execution of activities, visualization, and meeting deadlines.
Through this tool, it is possible to monitor all the tasks to be performed by the teams, specifically understanding those that are pending, those that are being executed, and those that have been completed.
The application of this system is efficient to optimize the time of activities and make services more productive in each sector with positive responses and results for its customers and users.
5. Reports and dashboards
Everything that is not measured, cannot be managed or improved. Numbers are important and help to reduce the subjectivity of team management.
Let's go to the initial concepts:
- Reports: you can understand it as a picture of the situation, an “image”, freezing what happened.
- Dashboards: look at them as the car dashboard that indicates speed and other information in real-time.
5.1 Reporting
Jira Software allows you to use both. For the reports, it is possible to either obtain "cash" reports, already existing ready in Jira, or:
- Burndown
- Burnup
- Velocity Chart
- Diagram Flow
- Cycle Time
- And others
As it is also possible to configure your own reports, and views that you want. And connected to a BI, it works miracles. Like the panel below that displays:
I usually say that working with Jira is having the creative freedom to build the report that makes sense for your context, regardless of what it is.
5.2 Dashboard
Jira dashboards allow you to track the delivery rate in real-time, and configure your own views. I confess that my favorite gadget to put on the dashboard is the health of the sprint, it allows you to see how things are going in that cycle.
6. The Jira Software marketplace
To paraphrase Thomas Merton, no software is an island. And in this, Jira Software does very well, in addition to the API Rest that allows you to connect it with several other platforms, Atlassian has made available a gigantic marketplace that grows every day. With it, you can use add-ons, such as:
- Script Runner improves workflow options and report building (filters).
- Eazy BI, allows you to have business intelligence reports.
- Time, allows you to use play and pause activities and generates hourly cost reports.
And there are thousands of other add-ons that can make your Jira Software even richer.
7. How to use Jira Software
Jira Software is a product developed to offer the best activity management conditions for any team that wants to incorporate kanban or scrum.
So, you can be creative and think of any team (development, legal, infrastructure, marketing, sales, etc.).
8. Jira system hosting
Jira Software can be purchased as SaaS, in this modality, you already hire the product itself, and the cloud hosting, this model is called Jira Cloud. However, if you prefer, you can buy a version and self-host on a cloud server or your own, in this case, Jira Server.See more about the article that explains the differences between Jira Cloud and Jira Server.
9. Getting Started with Jira Software
Have any questions? Feel free to contact me via email [email protected], it will be a pleasure to help you.
If you want to start using Jira Software, you can watch the video below:
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