What is Atlassian Jira?

Our IT department suggests that we use Jira for project management in Marketing. I have seen the surface but I am unsure? What for can Jira be used and why would you recommend it?

What is Atlassian’s Jira

Atlassian’s Jira is a suite of products that deals with issue tracking and managing work. The suite is comprised of 3 products: Jira Software, Jira Core, and Jira Service Desk. Your IT department was most likely talking about using Jira Core for project planning.

Jira Core is used by teams to manage and visualize their work. Jira also allows for workflow automation. In your case, you could create a project for a new marketing campaign that you are about to prepare for. Within that project you can create issues for each task in preparation for the marketing campaign such as brochure creation, logo design, venue bookings, etc. Once created the issues can be assigned to individuals and progress can be tracked on boards (Cloud only) or a list. The boards or lists show you the status of the issues and where they are in the workflows. The workflows can be as simple or as complex as you would like.

For more information and a free consultation, please visit our Jira information page.

Benefits of Jira

There are many benefits to using Jira. It allows the team to be transparent and accountable for their work. At any time, you can see:

  • Who is assigned to each issue
  • When an issue is due
  • What status an issue is in
  • How long an issue has been in a status
  • The details of an issue and what is being worked on

These are only some of the benefits that Jira brings. When a project is complete you can report on various details of each issue. The automation, transparency and reporting that Jira brings, improves teams’ efficiency and allows you to see where processes slow down.

Example of a Jira workflow for marketing

An issue is created by the marketing manager for the creation of a social media post. The marketing intern is assigned the issue. Once they have completed the post, they need to submit it for review. They would click the transition button and the issue is now in a status of “pending approval” and gets automatically assigned to the marketing manager to review. The manager then reviews the issue and clicks “Approve”. The issue moves to a status of “awaiting posting” and it also is assigned back to the marketing intern to post. Once the intern posts the social media post, they will then click the “done” button and the issue is complete.

Atlassian Jira is a group of software development tools that can be used by businesses, IT, operations teams, and more regardless of the size of the company. It’s purpose is to help these various companies manage different components of their business and optimize the way they plan, assign, report, track, and manage work within their everyday functionality. In order to provide these teams with the most effective way to improve performance, Jira is equipped with 4 different product platforms. This includes Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Ops/Opsgenie, and Jira Core. Each product has its own intricate template that was strategically designed for different uses and when all of them are combined it integrates flawlessly for all users whether it be a simple or complex agile project.

Jira Software

Jira Software is designed to help team members plan, track, and release software. Planning is an essential aspect for all software teams and by using Jira Software, users can easily communicate, discuss issues, and distribute tasks. By tracking progress users are able to have complete visibility of progress being made and analyze where data may need to be added or changes need to be made. When teams have gone through the process of creating, reviewing, and updating information where necessary, Jira Software makes it simple to release the software with confidence knowing there has been thorough analyzation of the product. This product is available for all team members to see and can improve overall performance.

Jira Service Desk

Jira Service Desk provides easy access for customers or employees to submit any requests that need to be resolved in real time. It is overall a help center designed to make resolving issues less stressful and more time efficient. It only takes one platform to resolve these issues and when in collaboration with Confluence it provides for an even more solid and well rounded foundation to help with problem solving.

Jira Ops/Opsgenie

Opsgenie is used for modern incident management. It uses monitoring, ticketing, and chat tools to help resolve any alerts of an error that may come about within the software. It is the critical alert system of Jira and provides teams with all of the crucial components to resolve an issue effectively and immediately. Opsgenie also includes a platform that can build and modify on-call schedules. It holds team members who are on-call accountable when the situation arises and helps define escalation rules. In addition to Alert and on-call features, it also provides on-call insights such as on-call time analysis where you can visually analyze where incident management has been successful or where there needs to be an improvement in the team’s performance.

Jira Core

Jira Core is a business project management software that helps to organize and manage projects while improving team organization as well. With this software you are able to manage projects and tasks, workflow, monitor details, and measure performance. Workflow is crucial when it comes to managing projects and when Jira Core is integrated with Cloud it creates a visual way to track team progress. Jira Core Cloud allows you to drag and drop tasks step by step in order to ensure adequate work flow and management. Monitoring details is made easy with Jira Core by notifying team members of statuses with project details while also affording them the opportunity to comment and view attachments making communication immediate and time efficient. When measuring performance, users are able to see what needs to be done, how many projects are still in progression and which team members have the heaviest workload.