Find out more about how to use Jira Software and Confluence to help your organization
grow and prosper.
Projects are a type of journey. You set a course, make plans, begin to progress, and perhaps make adjustment and course corrections as needed.
In the complex projects most digital service providers are being asked to produce and deliver, now more than ever we need an effective compass.
Atlassian’s Jira is such a tool; it provides our teams with the ability to plan, collaborate, deliver, and review progress as we create solutions for our customers.
In this Jira software tutorial, we will describe how companies can use tools like Jira software to map their own journeys to digital business success.
1. Find your Bearings
The first order of business is choosing a project type. Jira software can support projects for
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Bug tracking
Scrum tends to work best when the team can plan and execute its work in short iterations, generally called Sprints.
Kanban style approaches work better in situations where the work of flow in continuous, and the teams need to be able to prioritize and execute work to keep up with very dynamic needs.
Lastly, the Bug tracking approach enables development teams on large projects to document and track bugs and bug fixes (which you can also do in the other approaches).
Next you need to choose whether to use a Team Managed vs Company-Managed approach.
The Team Managed approach is simpler, enables fewer features, and more be a very good approach for a simple one-off project your team is working on.
For a broader set of enterprise projects, you’ll use a company-managed approach. This will provide you the ability to better control permissions, establish and automate workflows, and enable more sophisticated features like road mapping.
How to Use Jira Software to Organize and Manage a Project
Learn how to create a new Jira Project.
WATCH NOW2. Set Your Direction
Before you can set out on your journey, you’ll need to get your map, and use
your compass to plan your direction.
Once you have established a project in Jira, it’s time to set our direction.
You’ll use the Releases capability to plan for at least your first release of your solution.
Later on, especially if you plan is to deliver many subsequent releases, it will be helpful to track which capabilities are provided (or bugs fixed!) in which release.
Planning Releases
Learn how to create a release.
WATCH NOWNext you may want to organize your project by relevant Components, especially in a larger, complex project where different components will be needed to be worked on to produce a whole capability.
Create Components
Learn how to create some components.
WATCH NOWLastly, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll want to begin to create a Backlog of work.
A backlog is just a list of items the customer will need to achieve their project goals.
Working closely with your customers, users, and Product Owner, you will define a set of Issues.
Issues may be Epics (large pieces of work to be delivered over many sprints), Stories (a subset of an Epic that can be delivered in a single Sprint), Tasks (large scale tasks that are needed to support the teams work, like setting up the continuous integration environment), Bugs (as identified), and Subtasks (work to do to complete a Story, generally captured during Sprint Planning).
The Issues are identified, prioritized by your customer, and estimated by the work teams. Don’t worry if you don’t have all the issues you’ll ultimately need; we will add and reprioritize Issues as we progress on the way.
You are ready to begin the journey!
3. Define Your Waypoints
On a long journey, it’s important to set up waypoints, or shorter term target locations so you can stay on track. In the Jira Scrum-style projects, we do this through Sprint Planning.
Sprint Planning provides a final opportunity for the team to assess the scope of work, refine estimates, and make commitments to their Product Owner to deliver certain Stories in a Sprint (you can also add Tasks and Bugs as needed).
Once the team and the Product Owner have agreed to the Sprint scope, the teams engage in a task decomposition; what work needs to happen to deliver the stories. These are generally defined as Subtasks within each of the Stories and will be used to Track our progress as we work through the sprints.
VIEW JIRA WORKSHOP TRAINING
4. Track Your Progress
As you begin your hike, you will want to keep track of the activities; what you see, hear, etc. as you are walking through the woods.
Jira software operates as a record management system; it tracks assignees of work, activities and updates, and work status as tasks move toward completion. When all of the work is done, our Sprint goals should be complete.
As we go, we may see unplanned sights on the trail; as needed, the team may need to add additional subtasks to Stories to assure their completion.
Watch and Learn how!
Watch and learn how to Filter out particular issues.
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Agile Project Management using Jira Software
This Jira course introduces students to JIRA Software which is one of the most popular agile project management tool.
What you will Learn
- What is JIRA Software?
- Managing agile projects using JIRA Software
- Managing project backlog
- Managing iterations / sprints
- Managing releases / versions
- Managing project components
- Managing security
- Managing fields and screens
- Managing custom issue types
- Viewing various burn-down/burn-up reports
View Course Details
5. Bring your Backpack with You!
When you go on your hike, of course you’ll need to bring along your Backpack to help hold your things; your water, food, binoculars, a rain poncho, a first aid kit, and many other trail necessities.
Likewise, your project journey will require tracking and managing many different kinds of information, requirements, mock-up, charters, meeting notes, and many other things.
Many companies that use Jira software for their project compass use Confluence as their backpack.
Confluence allows a team to set of shared spaces to store their documents and provides almost a hundred templates for easy creation of many different types of project documents.
Linking Jira to a Confluence Page
Learn how to use the tool Confluence.
WATCH NOW6. Share the Load
Best of all, when you’re on a longer overnight hike, there may be shared gear that we can split among the hike participants to lighten our burdens. Likewise, teams using Jira Software and Confluence can engage stakeholders, facilitate transparency, promote visibility, and build trust.
By enabling your stakeholders to view and edit documents, add stories, or view reports, we encourage them to engage in the project, support its goals, and demonstrate that the solution is really for them.
Learn More about safe hiking with Jira software and Confluence
There is never a bad time for a great hike to a beautiful destination.
Using Jira Software and Confluence can help your organization to facilitate better project journeys and deliver more mountaintop moments for your teams and your organization.
Find out more about how to use these tools to help your organization grow and prosper.
See you on the trail!
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