Time is a challenge for our efficiency of task management in Jira. We spend hours dealing with repetitive, mundane, and manual work within software. Jira is a globally recognized and powerful project management tool that solves most of the problems of traditional ITSM solutions. Nevertheless, there are still ways to boost its effectiveness and make task management less time-consuming.

Jira offers good visibility of task progress and helps prevent scope creep while increasing teams’ productivity. However, things tend to become more demanding when creating and tracking tasks or requests, throughout their life cycle. And that often prolongs the decision-making processes, thus affecting the business.

Of course, the difficulties in managing tasks concern all groups of Jira users. We are talking about end-users, clients, managers, admins, support teams, etc.

After all, it all comes down to the connected vessels. A problem in one place may cause disturbances in another. We could say that the ideal situation is when admins and managers have everything under control and in perfect order. As for end-users, including clients, it’s best if they have convenient access to the tools and information they need – without having to participate in complicated Jira operations.

So, let’s get to the point about the problems we are discussing. What activities do we spend the most time on before actually starting the task?

Creating a task with long forms usually means scrolling through many unnecessary fields, answering questions unrelated to a specific project, and reading much redundant data. That opens the way to possible mistakes, accidental clicks, and the potential need to verify whether particular fields or information are necessary.
Besides, a poorly arranged form means low quality of input data in the request. And that further extends the time of its implementation.

Another problem occurs while creating similar issues for various Jira instances. That often means creating Epics with dozens of Stories and hundreds of tasks – every few days.

A simple example may be onboarding a new team member, starting a big marketing venture, or making the same issues resulting in different file types (e.g., in bug reports). Most of the time, all the mentioned tasks require repeating the same steps and introducing minor differences. That may cause mistakes and is time-consuming. More so, it’s dull and offers no opportunity for growth except for a dubious patience exercise.

Even if we finally grasp what we need, we still want to know to whom we should assign a task. And finding the person to ask for additional information can be a real challenge.

Gathering information is a tedious process in general. All the more so if it involves clicking between tabs and instances, looking for specific data, particular persons, schedules, contact info, and other essentials.
In the meantime, many tickets might have an ambiguous title, an imprecise or missing description, no attachments or comments.

It’s trivial yet worth emphasizing that the lack of crucial data and the difficulties listed above may result in long delays in starting work on the task. In consequence, it may harm the entire business process.

In addition to the previous inconvenience, there is jumping between issues scattered across Jira. Finding the substantial ones requires narrowing down their numbers and grouping them into a helpful list. The worst comes when we need to do it manually.

Of course, let’s not forget about visibility and access for the end-users to their request pages. Even if we can track the work progress and tasks in one place, we won’t always find all the information we need right away. And this again forces us to ask for updates, checking task after task for the information we need.

As you can already tell, there is much to think about. On the one hand, you are using a firm tool to manage all tasks, but on the other, it still needs further improvement. And since you’re on Deviniti’s blog, one question may come to your mind…

Deviniti apps aim to provide better care for your customers. Each solution makes users’ (support) experience more pleasant and convenient. Having that in mind, let’s see what improvements you can introduce to your Jira, and thus address the previously described problems. An example of the onboarding process will significantly support further considerations.

The first step is to enable quick and precise request submission with dynamic request forms and fields – tailored to specific needs. With Extension for JSM, you can enhance your customers’ satisfaction and improve their service experience. Shortened request forms make communication more accessible, more consistent, and less confusing.

What does it mean in practice? For example, an HR specialist can see more issue details for an onboarding process. That includes setting up permissions, and dynamic request forms provided by the admin. From this perspective, the request submission translates into more secure, transparent, and much faster issue implementation.

Having the Extension app, you can provide the user with data crucial for a given process. However, you will still need to include user properties to give your teams more context and boost their collaboration.

Azure AD Attributes for Jira allows to display of additional information from the external portal – Azure Active Directory. It helps your coworkers stay connected by presenting more contact options, and thus speeding up cooperation and problem-solving activities.

At the same time, the app also quickens the approval process. While creating an issue, you already have access to the information about the decision-maker assigned to the task (from Azure AD). This way, you save a significant amount of time you would spend looking for details across the company.

When creating issues in Jira, we often need to clone whole Epics with sub-tasks and other related tickets. Sometimes it involves entire repeatable structures. It’s undoubtedly a demanding process, requiring a lot of time and awareness.

In one of our articles, we mentioned that 28% of manually created Jira issues are instantly updated afterward due to mistakes made during creation – based on our internal research. In this case, templates using dynamic variables are more than a handy solution.

You’ll find these in Issue Templates for Jira. It’s a convenient tool allowing for autofilling issues with flexible Jira ticket templates. You can customize all of them by choosing the fields to copy.  It speeds up the issue creation and facilitates changes to a specific project by applying precise structures. For example, autocompleted fields allow the user to create any Epic just in a few seconds.

This way, the Issue Templates app saves time, boosts performance, and increases overall consistency while limiting errors.

It would be of great help if our tasks contained information crucial for a specific venture. All the more so when there is Confluence on the horizon. Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki designed by Atlassian to create, organize, and collaborate on work in one place.

It’s no surprise that both Jira and Confluence may perfectly complement each other. But switching or maneuvering between both is rather inconvenient and sometimes takes too long.

And this is where Advanced Confluence Integration for Jira should caught your attention. It allows you to display the needed Confluence pages on your Jira issues as well as create and manage every page structure.

Such an approach helps users save more time since they can focus only on the necessary information on the issue. Some data may be restricted depending on the user’s role in the given project.

The app best suits support and testing teams, customer service departments, and others working in Jira and Confluence.

Looking at all the improvements so far, we should not forget that managing issues also requires working with multiple projects. Most involve specific tasks across Jira. And so, filtering and displaying the important ones as a queue on a single screen is an attractive feature for all users and teams working with many Customer Portals and issues from other projects (Jira Software or Jira Work Management).

Queues for JSM helps create Jira queues containing tickets from any project. You can create any number of tickets and restrict the visibility of each – globally and from a single project. For better clarity, you can put and thus sort queues into folders.

The application helps various users (and teams) save time, giving them insight into each other’s work and making communication effortless.

Another helpful and time-saving Deviniti app gives users control over their request list. It enables them to configure each list according to their needs.

With My Request Extention for JSM, you can add, change, and reorder all visible columns on the Request list and navigate through them with filters (defined by specific criteria). Additionally, you can save your search configuration and share it with coworkers or strictly selected groups.

It’s worth mentioning that the solutions and applications on which we based all examples are not limited to onboarding. They will also be helpful and successfully increase the efficiency of other processes, such as:

Out of the box and with the default setup, Jira can make our ventures more time-consuming. However, as a professional task management software, it enables flexible adaptation of instances to individual and unique needs. All it takes is to choose apps from the Atlassian Marketplace, where different vendors offer their solutions for Jira.

This way, Deviniti – a Platinum Solution Partner – provides applications that allow users to increase their efficiency and reduce the time (even up to a third) needed to create and manage tasks.

The apps enhance the Customer Portal experience, allowing users to focus on productive activities and exchange only the needed information. From a broader perspective, this ensures greater agility of implemented projects, better communication with users and customers and thus greater competitiveness in a given market.