JIRA as a Collaborative Software?
Atlassian’s JIRA has proven itself a leader in the issue tracking market in the last five years.
With 12,000 customers in over 100 countries, JIRA allows enterprises to record and monitor every issue a user identifies until the issue is resolved from an innovative, customizable interface. It allows users to track issues through a wide variety of contextual filters. It makes issue tracking easy and efficient.
But considering JIRA a collaborative software? Surely you can’t be serious.
Consider JIRA’s project management capabilities. The JIRA user can browse projects and measure progress by viewing:
- Recent changes to issue status
- Charts and reports articulating recently changed statuses, recently viewed issues, etc
- Planning/task boards for project management via GreenHopper.
GreenHopper allows the JIRA user to keep up with tasks (issues, requirements, user stories, and virtually anything you want) by representing each task as a color-coded on-screen index card. Each card estimates and describes the effort required to complete each task, and can be dragged around the screen for customized organization.
JIRA’s GreenHopper also offers users the Sprint Planning Board and Charting Progress to keep employees on the same page.
Employees using JIRA can constantly update the progress of a variety of tasks. That kind of clarity– always having a go-to, updated project status– is worth its weight in gold in the scope of Business Process Management (BPM) due to its efficiency. It’s accomplished with collaboration through JIRA software.
JIRA’s collaborative abilities only raise the appeal it’s built on its issue tracking capabilities. While it’s not a SharePoint/document sharing-type tool, we consider it a valuable tool for enterprise collaboration in issue tracking.
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Filed under: Business Process Management (BPM), JIRA | 3 Comments
Tags: Business Value, Efficiency, Enterprise Collaboration, Operations Improvements, Process Management, Project Management
Atlassian does produce some excellent products and have some good people on their team. I have published some of their articles on PM Hut, such as this one by Melanie Carasso on Agile and Program Risk Management.
I am not so positive about SharePoint, becasue it requires more user training and attention of system administrator (setting access rights, etc), then the simple file sharing featues of JIRA (as attachments to issues)
Moreover, the concept of text documents in separate files (as Word or PDF) will be replaced soon by wiki´s such as Confluence.
It depends. JIRA’s great as a project management tool if what you’re looking for is a tool that can associate documents with projects, offer easy file-sharing, and track progress using issues.
If want to use the tool to facilitate other capabilities as well – document templates, process automation, custom build-outs, etc – SharePoint’s a better choice since it’s more robust. While it requires more effort, you’re getting more mileage out of it if you take full advantage of the software.
The effectiveness of either tool depends on how it’s used and what philosophical understanding of information architecture it’s working within.
You can also integrate Atlassian Confluence capabilities with SharePoint or with JIRA to take advantage of both.