Project Management Tool: Jira, some difficulties
Modern problems require modern solutions. With the internet boom in the 90’s IT projects became larger and more complex in nature requiring more software tools to manage the projects themselves. With the advent of Agile and Scrum, one such tool that became massively popular through the IT industry is Jira.
Jira, created by an Australian-based company named Atlassian, spearheaded the creation of a agile project management tool capable of applying the SCRUM methodology in which features and other wants and needs of clients are expressed in the form of ‘digital’ Post-Its. They are small little cards that go like ‘As a user I would like to see my account balance on my front page after a log in’. The tool can be a great source of information when you want to know which items teams within a company are working on. However, there’s a bunch of caveats usually ignored or neglected by daily users that make Jira difficult to use.
Cards here, Cards there, Cards everwhere
Jira has a bunch of options, lanes, sections and views with each having their own buckets with feature requests coming in from clients and the company itself. If you are not familiar with all Jira’s hidden chambers where your cards go, you might run the risk of creating the same items multiple times because of older ones being swallowed by the complex graphical interface of the software.
Jira running on premise? Good luck convincing your IT department you want plug-ins
The data in Jira is queryable. The guys at Atlassian made their own querying language so that users can lookup data within Jira’s database. This database, can also be queried by third-party plugins, usually to transform data or display it differently or simply to export it to other software application for visualization or further processing. So plugins can be quite handy. However, if your company policies do not allow third-party plugins, you’ll have to write plugins by yourself, or extract the data to some format and import it in your own software.
So, if your organization is planning to install Jira to manage your projects, do consider properly training all your employees that are planning to use Jira before they start with an actual project. Otherwise you run the risk of creating an atmosphere were people start ignoring or neglecting items, or, simple lose interest to participate.
To apply Jira, I would recommend doing introducing your company on how Agile and Scrum work along with Jira before starting a real project using the tool.