Jira — Why Some Hate, While Others Love
Loving or hating it, Jira is one of the most famous tools in the world, and evolved drastically in the past 5 years.
Owned by Atlassian, in early 2000’s Jira was a mere task tracking tool and, even I, until 4 years ago, had never heard about it.
Nowadays, Atlassian counts on a complete solution for collaborative documentation, project management, agile methodologies, DevOps, code repository and all the Service Management end, including on-call management, automatic postmortem logging, among others.
Taking Atlassian Seriously
Many people still see Jira as that old, task tracking, full of bugs and confusing tool, but let me give you three data that might make you taking Jira into account again.
1 — Google Trends
Since 2004, this is how the interest on Jira has grown.
2 — Atlassian Stocks
Since 2015, Atlassian stocks came from $27,5 to $412,88.
If you compare it to ServiceNow, per example, they are getting closer, with a huge difference in terms of license price.
Atlassian is getting there and it doesn’t even appears on Gartner Quadrant for Service Management yet.
Recently, Google announced a native integration between Google Workspace and Jira.
Why is Atlassian growing so fast
I’d assign this success journey to five factors:
- The pricing strategy
- Product structure
- Smart architecture
- The APIs
- The value added is tied to the company’s maturity
Pricing Strategy
Those who already tried to start a business know that any cost is a candidate to be avoided!
Atlassian allows you to run it with up to 10 users for free, what enables many startups to start working with a high quality software without paying the relative price.
However, differently of other tools, this is not a trap. The price remains affordable while you grow, costing on average $7.5 per user, per month.
With that, you can count on a long-term partner to support your business growth.
Product Structure
It’s not because the price is good, that you’ll get limited in the future.
Atlassian has split it’s solution into different products, such as Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Confluence and others, what facilitates for companies to get only what they need, reducing costs.
Additionally, they’ve invested in a live Marketplace community, where anyone can develop and sell new add-ons. This might be a pitfall, since you constantly depend on add-ons to move on, impacting significantly the costs, but this also increases significantly the alternatives available.
Frequently, those marketplace add-ons end up overcoming Atlassian features, being finally acquired by Atlassian and incorporated.
Smart Architecture
If you spend enough time trying to understand Jira architecture, you’ll notice that it is simpler than it looks like. Basically, Jira is composed by:
- Containers (so called “projects”)
- Process types (so called “Issue type”)
- Workflows
- Attributes/fields
- Instances of the processes (so called “Issues”)
- Other automation capabilities
With this architecture, we can say that Jira is essentially a BPMS, or however you use to call a process automation suite.
This is quite interesting, because, with some creativity, you can automate almost anything in a company.
In a company I served between 2018 and 2021, to address the GRC efforts, we’ve created an “Issue type” called “Audit” and another called “Finding”, and assigned to them typical audit and finding workflows and related attributes (fields), automatizing the finging delegation.
Many times I’ve avoid the costs of acquiring new products or add-ons just by using creativity.
The APIs
Jira has a rich, broad and smart API architecture. Any person with minimum scripting skills can automate tasks, reports and integrations with Jira.
This is particularly relevant, because you end up avoiding additional costs with add-ons just by developing simple scripts.
A few examples of automations I already made with Jira:
- Data extraction for Google Spreadsheet to use with Google Data Studio
- Integration between Jira and HR system to connect both worlds
- Integration between Jira and Slack to communicate automatically Major Incidents and Change Approvals etc.
Additionally, if your company has a culture of autonomy, empowerment and distributed strategy capability, you enable ever single person to run the continuous improvement wheel, instead of centralizing it into a single area.
The value added is tied to the company’s maturity
This one for me is the most important aspect!
While ServiceNow, BMC Remedy and other tools bet on delivering out-of-the-box processes, aligned to best practices, Jira failed doing that. However, by failing this, they’ve got to the most strategic aspect of the tool: flexibility!
The world of management is evolving quickly, and old practices evolve and change constantly. As Jira is a kind of business process automation tool, we end up having the right level of flexibility to create and adapt quickly for that changing times.
But there’s an equivalent level of risk and opportunity.
If you put the implementation into purely technical hands, who doesn’t deeply understand the management practices (agile, ITSM, project, governance etc.), it may turn into a huge mess, full of inconsistencies.
It’s not because almost everything is possible that everything should be done!
By the other hand, it doesn’t result having purely managerial minds, who understand the processes but doesn’t understand the tool!
The tool and the processes both boost and limit each other!
This profile it’s still rare, but companies must develop a mixed capability between management practices and Jira automation if they want to achieve it’s full potential.
Conclusion
I started my career developing an ITSM suite and I had the opportunity to work in different procurement projects, assessing more than once tools like ServiceNow, BMC and IBM.
I worked directly with several ITSM, project management and BPMS tools, and architected Jira to cover most of the processes of a global technology team, with about 2.000 people.
After these 12 years, I believe Atlassian brings one of the best recent opportunities of achieving high performance digital processes.
The difference between creating lovers or haters resides on how you architect Atlassian tools alongside with your management practices.
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Read also:
- Management by Value & Opportunities — Enabling Remote to avoid using Jira to Micromanage and;
- Service Oriented Organizations, which may be enabled by Jira.
