Effective project management is crucial for success. Jira stands out as a premier platform, offering teams the tools to streamline workflows, track tasks, and collaborate seamlessly. However, the initial setup of projects in Jira can often be cumbersome, eating into valuable time and resources - especially without proper approaches and project management skills. To address this challenge, innovative solutions like Issue Templates Agent and Epic Sum Up have emerged.
Let’s explore how to contribute to more efficient project management workflows by prioritizing time-saving measures, enhancing user experience, and focusing on delivering exceptional results while driving organizational success.
How to create a Jira project? What do you need to know, and what are the best practices?
Integrate third-party applications to enhance Jira's capabilities. Apps offer additional tools and functionalities to streamline project management processes, saving time and improving overall efficiency.
Remember to get proper permission to create a Jira project!
In Jira, the foundation of any project lies in creating issues. These issues represent tasks, bugs, features, or any other units of work that need to be tracked and managed throughout the project lifecycle. How many issues have you already had on your board? How many of them are recurring or made for another team?
Those factors are challenging for effective Atlassian project management because they are time-consuming, error-prone, and miscommunication-prone. Find out how to save your team from these and create exceptional project management that is effective, efficient, and comprehensive. The answers are templates.
Let’s picture it with a bug-reporting use case. Bug reporting serves as a crucial bridge between testers and developers. Testers create many bugs daily. It depends on the organization scale, but creating all the same issues with the exact details can be tedious and time-consuming.
Moreover, testers need to know the details in Jira issues description to provide the necessary data to resolve the bug.
And here are the challenges:
How to eliminate it and manage projects effectively with top-notch cross-team communication and collaboration?
An effective way to tackle the problems caused by irregular issue procedures is to use issue templates. Issue templates are pre-formatted issue patterns that assist testers (and other employees) in creating tickets accurately and consistently.
With Issue Templates Agent, you can create ticket templates that are applied right on the create issue screen, streamlining issue creation across many projects.
There is also a possibility of creating hierarchies with subtasks to manage whole processes, like an onboarding process or test plan for a new app version or new version release.
Create templates for each use case your teams need to boost project management. Gather ideas from your co-workers and make a template library that will save hours of your unit time. Each template can be assigned to many projects, is easily editable, and set up as default when creating issues of the exact issue type.
! With templates, you can save hours monthly on issue creation. Let your team focus on resolving tasks, not their creation.
Jira issue templates reduce the effort of manual data entry and guarantee that important information is regularly included in bug reports by offering standardized frameworks that cover bug descriptions, replication procedures, expected behavior, and attachments.
Standardized templates offer a common language and format for communicating information related to bugs, which further promotes improved communication between developers and testers.
Bug reporting is one, but issue templates can be used in many business scenarios, such as onboarding and offboarding, purchase request templates, etc.
We’ve prepared a ready-to-copy cheat sheet of them!
Find inside and feel free to copy:
Using templates means saving time and boosting project management workflows. It’s also eliminating errors and improving communication between teams. Try it on your own for free.
For recurring and repetitive tasks, check out Issue Scheduler. With this tool, you can save your automation limits and still have all returning tasks scheduled in advance and appear at the right time.
For example, when you have an annual politics review to do, you can schedule a one-year task to ensure it won’t be missed. If you have a weekly sales performance report to do, schedule a specific task for each week.
Use variables to customize each task, and specify when the issue should appear - with CRON format, weekly, daily, or maybe just one more time.
This way, you will make it easier for you and your team, and the creation of project sprints becomes quicker and more efficient.
After you have created issues, it’s essential to plan them. Including setting estimations for how long it will take you to complete specific tasks as well as setting deadlines until when things need to be completed.
When setting estimations and deadlines for specific individual issues, it’s easy to lose the context of the issue. You don’t see how much effort the other tasks took and how many resources are still available for this project.
With Epic Sum Up, you can plan all your issues from one view without losing context.
Using the Detail View Editor, you can see all the other issues and plan everything in one view.
The key benefit is being able to see the whole context. You can see how much others estimated for their tasks, how much budget your team was given to complete specific projects and which issues have which due dates.
Now that you have created and estimated all your issues: How do you keep track of your projects?
How do you stay up to date with all of the issues inside your projects? All the bugs that are being reported?
The answer is Epic Sum Up.
Different projects track different KPIs. Accessing all these metrics can require in depth data analysis to determine the state of the project. In order to get a quick overview, visualization is key. Here is where progress bars come in. Progress bars sum up all values from a structure into one visual indicator, showing you exactly how the project is progressing.
Possible metrics to track include time, personnel costs, business value, story points, and any numerical metric you can think of.
Continuing with the example use case of bug tracking, the Detail View Editor is the place where managers can get an overview of how many bugs have been raised, how many are already fixed and how much time was spent on each individual bug or all of them.
This same overview can also show you all the recurring tasks you scheduled if you add them to the same parent.
No matter what you need to report on, Epic Sum Up allows you to fully customize your view based on your needs and afterwards you can export it to Excel, CSV or print it. All in just a few clicks.
This is especially helpful if you need to keep your managers in the loop on how things are going.
And if you or they need an overview of how much time each team member spent on their tasks you can use our simple Time Sheet to create the report you need. Which can be exported to CSV and Excel, too.
Creating projects and issues is the foundation of any good project management in Jira. It all starts with defining your objectives and requirements. Based on these, you can choose the right Jira project type.
Once your project is set up, it’s time to make it your own. Starting with the customization of settings and continuing with the integration of third-party apps.
Project creation is an ongoing process where it’s important to involve team members to foster a culture of mutual understanding which includes making iterations where necessary.
Now that you are all set up, you can start with the creation of issues. A time-consuming task, especially for the initial set-up.
Issue Templates Agent is here to help you minimize that effort. You can create templates for any of your use cases, saving you hours of valuable time.
And with the template cheat sheet guide, you already have access to tons of templates completely for free.
And with adding Issue Scheduler to the mix, you don’t have to worry about forgetting that recurring task anymore. Issue Scheduler will simply create it for you.
Now that your issue creation process is optimized it’s time to look into how you can effectively plan your issues. With Epic Sum Up you can plan everything in one view.
To stay on top of everything that’s going on, progress bars serve as visual indicators to track your most important KPIs. With a click on any of them, offering more details into specific problems that are arising.
This article is also published on Aptis blog.