Raunak Hajela

@raunakhajela

7 Jira project management best practices

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Project management can be a daunting task for project managers and project team members. Jira is a powerful issue and project tracking application that enables organizations to manage their business processes with transparency, accountability, and efficiency. I use Jira at What a Story to manage issues and tasks for my web, or mobile application projects. 

Recently, I was reviewing the JIRA project management setup by my client and found it to be super complex, messy, and started optimizing it. 

To help improve project management, I’ve written this guide where I compiled a list of 7 Jira project management best practices to follow. These strategies will help you be more organized and manage your project more effectively, and efficiently. 

  1. Do not create lots of Epics on JIRA, this makes management complicated and messy. Epics are like categories, they have a special purpose but don’t overdo it. Instead, you can use a label or component in JIRA.
  2. Backlog and Todo have the same meaning in the agile process so keep one, just add the tasks that team needs to do over Backlog, as soon as they start working on the task they move it to the Ongoing status, and so on.
  3. Avoid status like Sprint, and Sprint done. You can create a sprint on the Backlog page in JIRA, start it, configure the sprint schedule. There is no point in having a separate board for this.
  4. Provide clear task/bug title, and proper steps to reproduce under description. Use Loom to record a video for better context.
  5. Avoid making duplicate cards. While adding a card search if there is an existing card for the same issue and re-open, if the existing card is related but still different then create a new card and use the Linked issue feature of JIRA.
  6. Use the Priority option to add the task priority, you can configure issue display properties in the settings.
  7. Avoid making each card type as a Task, use Bug-type if something is an issue or a bug. Use Task type if you want a new feature, a new improvement over an existing feature, content or assets update, or any card you assign which is not a bug. 

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