JIRA is more than a dev tool. Use JIRA for the whole company for risks, assets, and customer projects, but beware of ticket overload.

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At Yonder, like at many other software companies, we use JIRA to track development work. We follow the rules of SCRUM, at least more or less: practicality is more important to us than text-book adherence.

We work with sprints, boards, timelines, and releases, which are all built into the JIRA core product.

It’s those core features that made us decide to use JIRA not just for the dev teams, but also for most other teams in the company. Here is why:

  • Breaking down work: Almost all work that is accomplished in a team is complex. JIRA allows complex work to be broken down into small chunks of work, which can then be assigned to different team members.
  • Filtered overviews: It’s easy to lose the overview over a ton of small tasks and tickets. JIRA allows each team member to filter issues dynamically, to match the view that’s required for a certain role.
  • Transparency: In contrast to many other IT systems, JIRA tickets are visible to all team members by default. That’s a huge advantage to make sure the whole team sees the bigger picture, and nobody loses time while waiting for access to be granted to certain information.
  • Dynamics: JIRA tickets can be updated by multiple people, and all changes are visible in real time to all team members.

What We Use JIRA for Besides Dev Work

Risk Register

We are an ISO 9001-certified company, so we keep a risk register. Most companies use a static Excel list for their risk register. In contrast, we created a JIRA ticket for every risk, allowing the risk to be updated and monitored in real-time than what would be possible using Excel. A JIRA dashboard provides an overview of all the risks, including a risk matrix.

In a software company, some of the risks are IT security risks, originating from regular penetration tests and customer security screenings. JIRA makes it possible to keep the overview of all the IT security risks in multiple teams without duplicating the information— because JIRA tickets can be linked to more than one JIRA project.

If you’re interested to know how you can create your own risk register using JIRA, this article provides a step-by-step guide.

Asset Register

We are also ISO 27001-certified, so we also keep an asset register. It lists all information assets that need protection — contracts, patents, hardware equipment, just to name a few.

So guess what: every information asset is a JIRA ticket, and a JIRA dashboard provides an overview of all the assets, including when assets are up for renewal or decommissioning.

If you’re interested to know how you can create your own asset register using JIRA, this article provides yet another step-by-step guide.

Customer Projects

Customers have all sorts of queries and there are all sorts of tasks to be done to make and keep customers happy. It goes far beyond the typical service desk, which is why we track all the customer project and account management tasks in JIRA, too. And yes, in this way we can also keep track of a security ticket raised by a customer in both the customer team and the security team.

Conclusion

JIRA is great, but there are other great Kanban tools out there. It doesn’t matter which tool you use, all have pros & cons. I miss the following two features most in JIRA:

  • Due date by default: Tools like Asana or Monday.com have a due date by default on all the tickets. Then tickets turn red once they become overdue, which is great to keep stuff not just on track, but also on time. JIRA doesn’t have a due date field by default, it needs to be configured manually for each issue type, which is cumbersome.
  • Recurring tasks: Many tasks are recurring — be it daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Tools like Asana or Monday.com feature recurring tickets, where a new task is generated whenever a recurring task is completed. In this way, you’ll never forget to create follow-up tickets. JIRA doesn’t have that, so no wonder many software companies using JIRA always renew SSL certificates at the last possible moment.

So I leave it to you to guess what tool I use for my personal work organization.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which tool you use. It matters that somebody feels responsible for tasks and tickets. If everybody just creates tickets in the hope that somebody will eventually do the work, you’ll end up in a ticket graveyard.