Pros/Advantages of Using Jira in Project Management

Team collaboration and healthy, strong communication play a major role in effective and successful project management. Therefore, Jira is a great help in terms of project planning, work division, tracking and management. It is a product that stands out in this field and provides many advantages.

If we want to explain the advantages and advantages of Jira in project management in more detail;

1 . Flexibility and Customization

Jira provides a platform opportunity for users to customize their projects according to their needs. We can adjust our project management process according to our own requirements and preferences. It offers many customization options, such as customization of tasks, workflows, priorities and ways of displaying data. For example, we can manage our workflow and project processes with Kanban, Scrum or custom workflow templates in Jira. We can also create a Scrum workflow together with our development team. We can track tasks, sprints and feedback, and adjust the workflow to suit our team based on changes or feedback on the stages in this process. This can be an example of adaptability for different projects and teams.

2. Workflow Management

One of the biggest advantages of Jira is workflow management. Workflows allow you to define different phases, responsibilities and collaboration processes in the project. To give an example, for example, in our Jira Board, workflow phases can be as follows.

We can create the flow with titles such as To Do, Drafting, Waiting, In Progress, In Review, Approved, QA, Created/Done. As can be seen in the image of the board, making things understandable and manageable becomes really easy with this product. We can detail what needs to be done for each stage of work positioned here. For example, we can open the work of a newly created request from the work teams (waiting in a different board, for example Backlog) to our own Board and assign it to the Task, filling in the requirements, who has it, the difficulty level of the work, or whether it is a development or a bug. Then, when the relevant person starts this development, they can drag this task from To Do to In Progress. In this way, the traceability item of job tracking will be greatly facilitated for us.

3 . Task and Error Tracking

When we create a bug report, Jira provides us with a bug card. We can elaborate on this card, enter error details, and get a clear tracking structure with calendar features. We can prioritize and assign. For example, we can track when a Task fails and after assigning it to the relevant person or another person, we can follow the process again following the same steps until the Done item. We can follow whether it is a new job, a bug or a failed item from the history section of the item, or if it is a directly created error card, we can only get information from the Type information. This way, the project manager or team leader can track the bug status and approve it if necessary.

4 . Communication and Collaboration

I mentioned about facilitating communication and collaboration between team members, and it offers several features for this. Another feature is that we can comment in the articles created for each task/job. We can ask for details when we can’t find enough explanation here, or we can provide a clear comment for the improvements we have made. Our teammates can also comment on the tasks we are working on, discuss issues, share files and send notifications to the relevant people. This feature makes it easier for us to interact and share information. It will be a great help when we look back in the future or for our other teammates/managers to remember or understand at that moment. Let’s write comments on our Jira’s…

5 . Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics, another feature of Jira, provides project managers and team leaders with valuable information about the progress of the project. It has many templates such as completed tasks, delays, process efficiency, etc. Thanks to these reports, project managers and team leaders can track progress and evaluate performance. They can make improvements based on the results. For example, they can examine periods according to the causes and frequency of delays. We can optimize business processes, and if there is a need for additional resources, we can try to meet it. For another example, we can take work intensity and number of errors under control in certain quarters by evaluating them on a person and team basis.

Requirements and test case management teams, agile teams, project management teams, product management teams, task management teams, defect tracking teams and software development teams can use Jira effectively and according to their requests.

Jira also supports a variety of plugins and integrations to help working teams. Let’s take a look at a list of some of the software and integrations supported by this life-saving feature;

• AdobeXD
• Figma
• Invision
• Github
• Kanban
• Scrum
• Zendesk
• Trello
• MS Teams
• Confluence
• Jenkins and many more…

Jira Key Terms We Would Be Very Useful to Know

Sprint : A work management cycle used for customer projects, typically consisting of two weeks.
Backlog : A focused list of work that needs to be prioritized.
Task Scores : Based on effort, complexity and risk on a scale of 0–8/ 0–21.
Scrum Board : Usually used in all customer-focused projects, consisting of main elements such as to-do, in progress and completed columns.
Kanban Board : Used mostly for product related work.
Tag : Tags are necessary to categorize any problem. Also, it helps you to find a problem quickly.
Workflow : Workflow moves a story between board columns.
Action Log : Contains a list of all actions taken.
Type : Task type.
Epic : A large piece of a task divided into smaller and easier steps.
Risk Log : A list of risks identified during the fulfillment of any project task.
Technical Task : Smaller tasks of the project (story).

With these basic technical details and examples, I have covered many important advantages in the project management process such as flexibility, collaboration, tracking, reporting, etc. These features provide better control and monitoring for project managers, team leaders and all team members. Thus, it also increases the chances of increasing the project success rate to very high levels.