My first post was just a lot of waffling as you could notice, so let's get to the point! I've spent the last few days thinking about what this post should be about and today I just made my mind: I'll start from the beginning... and the beginning is always a user requirement:
"Hey, we need a system that allows us tracking all our projects and tasks, helping us organising our daily work, estimating our work load, logging time against tasks and from which we can generate reports. And, by the way, the system is JIRA because I've heard that it's very flexible and scalable".
All in all, the request sounded very reasonable to me. After having used JIRA for a couple of years, both as a simple user and as a project administrator, I thought it was going to be quite simple. However, user requirements are often very simplistic in the beginning and not before you start showing them some drafts do you realise what they really need. Actually, when it comes to process modelling they need those drafts to define their own requirements.
This is the point where I wanted to get to. Of course, there was a part of the project consisting of software development (and JIRA is a great solution for that, including reports), but there was another team doing something completely different. This bit included complex workflows, check points where governance comes into play, a complex hierarchy of tickets and a very detailed level of reporting based on work logs, type of task, work log attributes and process key dates... lots of dates.
We achieved the goal - I wouldn't be posting this if we didn't :D - and the process of implementation has been fascinating. The overall conclusion is that JIRA is an extremely flexible tool (here the user was right), relatively cheap for the features provided and with a bit of time you can give customers a fantastic product for managing not only tasks but also projects.
So, is JIRA the best tool in the market for project management and process automation?
Well, I'm not saying JIRA is unbeatable as a multi-purpose solution because I haven't had the chance to test other applications out there. However I can affirm it can be very powerful in combination with some plugins (Agile, Tempo, JJupin...). It requires some learning time but it is worth the journey.
I will build on this idea of transforming a ticketing system into something much nicer in the next few articles :)
Keep your eyes peeled!
Sergio
