In this blog we’ll look at Jira. It started as a relatively simple issue tracker in 2002 and has been enhanced by Atlassian over the years to become a project management platform used by over 300,000 companies around the world.

Pathway IT Consultants has managed many projects that included Jira. It is a solid product, but issues with the use of Jira had to be resolved while rescuing projects.

Issues With the Way Jira Was Used

The most common issues with using Jira were:

• Not training the users. This led to a number of issues, with one of the most common ones being the wrong level of severity being applied to issues.
• Poor data being imported to Jira. 
• Not updating Jira in a timely manner.
• Creating overly complicated workflows.
• Lack of test environments with the resulting issues in production.

Please let me add that these were problems with how Jira was being used, not issues with the application.

Key Activities to Ensure Success with Jira

1. Professional project initiation is critical. You should manage implementation of Jira as a separate project. Please document the objectives, agree on administration and support roles and define the critical success factors.
2. Train all users of Jira and include ongoing training for all relevant people joining the organisation.
3. Review and update any information you are going to import into Jira. Please don’t plan to import the data and then update it in Jira. It is far more efficient to start with quality data. This approach also makes training and adoption of Jira easier.
4. Document the issue severity and include this in the training and in your quick reference guide. Make the definition of the severity simple and clear.
5. Monitor the issues and identify any person or group not following the issue severity guidelines. It is not uncommon for people to assign a higher level of criticality to an issue. On one project a department raised all their tickets as a P1. (Critical/cutover showstopper.) When asked about this, they agreed that they weren’t showstoppers but said that they raised all of them as a P1 to ensure that they were worked on first. After additional training they only raised a P1 if it was a true showstopper.
6. Keep workflows as simple as possible for the initial implementation and enhance as required.
7. Stress the importance of timely updates. If the information is not up-to-date, this will cause multiple issues. On one project that had to be rescued, the senior stakeholders were concerned that the cutover would have to be delayed due to the number of outstanding issues included in a report. Pathway held a workshop with the developers, test teams and business representatives to determine the correct status of all the tickets. A high percentage of the issues had been resolved, but the tickets hadn’t been updated. The project was delivered on time, and the senior IT management issued a three-line whip on timely updates.
8.  A separate Jira test environment is highly recommended. This will allow you to test changes to workflows, etc., before releasing updates to the production environment.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it covers the main issues seen with the use of Jira.

Methodologies Supported by Jira

Jira has a high level of support for the Scrum and Kanban Agile frameworks. Scrum (sprints and backlogs) and Kanban (continuous workflow). 

However, it can support any Agile framework, Hybrid or Waterfall methodology. Jira supports date-based and sprint-based scheduling.

Jira AI

Atlassian Rovo can be used to increase efficiency by:

• Creating summaries of issue comments.
• Enhance tone and clarity of text.
• Breaking down epics into smaller child issues.
• Supporting natural language queries. This allows people to ask for information instead of using complex Jira Query Language.
• Enhanced search capability due to contextual understanding.
• Automation of routine tasks.
• Provision of context and insights.

AI Considerations

The items in the previous section will bring benefits to projects, but please consider the following when using AI on any platform.

• Relying too much on AI. Please sense-check all AI outputs.
• AI hallucinations. The information can look accurate, but it can be incorrect. This reinforces the requirement for human review and oversight.
• Data privacy and security. If you are processing sensitive data that is leaked, this could result in non-compliance issues with UK data protection laws.
• Attacks on data can lead to inaccurate AI outputs.
• Issues with accountability. Human oversight is critical. If you don’t understand how AI made a decision, and this impacts a project, it will be difficult to explain this to your stakeholders.
• The reliability of information generated by AI can be questionable.
• Relying too much on AI instead of strategic, critical analysis and thinking.

Key Jira Benefits for UK Commercial Organisations and Charities

The main benefits include the following:

• Improved collaboration.
• Strategic transparency for senior stakeholders.
• Increased efficiency from tailored workflow and automation.
• Improved ability to manage projects using Agile, Hybrid or Waterfall methodologies.
• Enhanced compliance and cost management. Organisations can use Jira to reduce costs and improve ROI by optimising workflow management. An example is charities tracking supporter interactions and improved budget information.

At the time of writing, Jira offers a free, no-card-needed starter option for teams under 10 users.