Jira Use Case templite:

Company Name: HappyDoers Ltd.

Industry: Productivity Software

Company size: 70 people

Team: Marketing

Problem: Lack of team visibility. As a result, some team members are too overloaded or do not have enough work to do.

In our article, we will consider the use case for Jira. As an example of the use case, we choose a mid-sized software company. But first, let’s see what is the basics of Agile Team.

Visibility, transparency, and communication in the Agile Team

Being an Agile is not about implementing the methodology or process, it’s about solving a problem and vision. Transformation to Agile should be defined with a clear vision.

I’ll highlight the three important points about the Agile Team:

• Visibility
• Transparency
• Communication

Visibility is a key to a successful Agile Team. All information must be visible and available for all teams in an organization to provide a good working environment. That shows the actual progress of projects for stakeholders, and all levels of organizational structure. This approach helps to save time by getting information faster and hitting deadlines.

Transparency provides clear information that can be understood by anyone. Transparency brings up trust in your company and team accordingly. When all your metrics are clear and understandable then you can encourage your team to work towards a common goal.

Communication stands on visibility and transparency. If these two next cases will be implemented in your work life, then communication will be a perfect conclusion. To reach a common decision between different departments could be very difficult. One department could act on the business side, while another department act on the development side. They both speak different languages. Data aggregated in one place makes communication a lot simpler – they’re all looking at the same information.

How to increase Team Visibility in Jira?

First things first, we consider in more detail the Team Visibility as this is the frequently asked question in Jira Community sometimes. So how to increase the team visibility in my team?

Jira has one missing gap – its visibility.

Here is the action plan for increasing Team Visibility:

• find gaps in time frames
• check the time estimates
• determine over- and underestimated tasks
• check the deadlines
• detect who is overloaded and underloaded employees
• keep an eye on overdue or expired tickets
• have a unified board with all milestones, perspectives, and task
• prioritize the work
• measure the productivity

And the right tool is needed for that.

Jira Use Case Example:

How ActivityTimeline deal with Team Visibility?

A unified system of record can help your teams organize all the information related to their projects in one accessible place. A comprehensive planning tool such as ActivityTimeline provides them the visual information on who’s doing what, what tasks have been finished or are in progress, and how much time your team has in their hands.

To begin with, you should understand the main working units at Activity Timeline. These are the teams, team members, their tasks, and the timeline that gives you full visibility of the project.

Let’s see our Jira use case. In ActivityTimeline you can see all team members (user) or teams in one place. In this case, HappyDoers company has Customer Success, Finance, Graphic Designers, IT Support, Marketing, Product Development, Product Management, UI/UX Designers, Web Development, and QA teams. All these teams are managed in ActivityTimeline.

Let’s choose the marketing team to see how Happy Doers planned their employee’s work on the granular level. And to see how Agile is implemented in the marketing team. And how visibility can help in a working process.

Consider the dynamic team created for the marketing department to broadcast communications between all marketers in a company. In such a case in ActivityTimeline, we’ll create a functional team based on positions and skills. This feature is useful for temporary projects.

 Visualizing all marketing tasks related to a project on one board can be challenging. With the timeline view process from “create” to “done” become quicker. The timeline dashboard gives the perspective view and there are several options to find a gap in planning and estimates.

On a timeline or in a backlog panel manager can see those tasks not being completed on time. All overdue or expired tickets are marked red. And the number of expired tickets is shown near every employee, so a manager can see them immediately Also, every ticket has the mark “Priority”. Manager during a backlog grooming can visually check and reschedule what should be done first.

 Estimation is a big thing in planning. Estimating a project or tasks accurately is vital to being successful. And there are possibilities to minimize gaps with ActivityTimeline. If Jira’s estimated hours don’t show you a big picture, then Activity Timeline does. And under-, over-, and well-estimated tasks are visualized on the main board.

The next use case is about the over- and underloading of employees. To detect who is overloaded in the Jira system or underloaded employees in Jira possible in three ways: timeline board, timesheets, and reports. A simple way is to look on the Workload panel. All data have color-coding here for the easiest visualization as well. See the available resources or number of tasks per employee could be more useful for managers during the planning, which is present in the Workload panel as well. Besides, the panel shows vacations, holidays, sick leaves, and public holidays.

Here is the chosen Liquid Mode for estimation when the system will automatically put all hours upfront. Because here people begin to complete the new task once they’ve finished the previous one. This solution is the best here.

Team Visibility Use Case: Conclusion

Agile through visibility helps surface problems sooner. Good planning evolves as the team’s ability to predict improves. And ActivityTimeline provides visibility for Teams.

In the end, it’s how a well-planned dashboard will look like – proper estimation, prioritized, without task gaps and expired tickets, status is on track:

 Start a free month trial right now to check all features of ActivityTimeline