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Filters are the “Language” of JIRA

Often I describe JIRA as a large set of Legos in a bucket. JIRA is one of those tools that is so flexible it is hard to get your head around how to use it.

The Lego analogy works on many levels. Using the predefined project types, JIRA Agile, JIRA Service Desk, etc is like opening Lego kits. Yes, they still include regular legos, but the fun stuff only works when it is built in a certain way, and will only make what someone else imagined. While working with the standard block shapes you can put together almost anything you can imagine. With this in mind, there are three main components of JIRA that make up the core building blocks of a system: issues, workflows, and filters.

Every feature in JIRA revolves around one of the three. I want to focus on filters and their broad impact in JIRA. It is incorrect to think of all the issues in JIRA broken up into projects because this is simply not true, even a project is simply one filter of the greater issue store. All the issues created in your JIRA instance are in the same bucket. When JIRA moves to display items to the user it first looks to see what subset of issues this user has permission to see (regardless of project), and then shows the list based on the filter being used at the time.

A good way to think of this concept is the diagram included here. There is the larger issue bucket of the whole instance, and individual users can see the issues that span the projects, issue security, and permissions given to them. They are then able to apply filters within that cross-section they have rights to.

Filters are used for all Reporting, Agile boards, Dashboard Gadgets, Wallboards, API calls, and of course filtered issue lists. If you are looking at more than one issue on your screen, filters are at work.

Once you grasp this idea you can really start to use filters in a powerful way. I often see the light bulb come on in either day 1 or day 2 of our JIRA Boot Camp class. Users will often say, “So that is why <insert situation here> happens!” and then they will be empowered to fix some long-standing problem that has caused frustration with JIRA.

An important aspect of filters that is often overlooked is sharing. The lack of understanding runs across a wide spectrum. On one end people struggle with the idea that users cannot see a particular Agile board or a gadget on a Dashboard without having the necessary filter shared with them. Often in these environments the company is only organizing everything at the project level. These are also often the companies that only use the built-in issue types and avoid customized workflows. They will find it hard to have desired data and functions available where users need it.

The other extreme is the system where everyone automatically shares every filter with all users. In this situation people can easily get frustrated by having hundreds and sometimes thousands of filters to deal with. Over time the list just gets larger and larger as employees come and go within the company. Imagine if an average employee has 25 filters and the company turns over 100 employees per year. In two years you could have 5000 abandoned filters in the system.

It does not help that the interface adds confusion to an already complex idea. in the words of Inigo Montoya:

“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

On the main filter page is this big, obvious button that says “Share”. This is not actually how you share a filter! You must click into the less obvious “Details” hyperlink and add permissions to the filter. I do hope this gets fixed soon by the removal or re-purposing of the share button.

Neither of these extremes is actually necessary. The proper balance is to have an intentionality to sharing of filters and an administrative discipline to curate the issue list in the System Admin area of JIRA. See the image shown. In this area an admin can delete abandoned filters and change ownership of important ones. Keeping this list manageable is simply good JIRA hygiene.

Filters are a core building block of JIRA. Understanding them and guiding your users to apply them properly can dramatically improve the user experience.

User Adoption = Success

System Administrators often find themselves caught trying to fulfill the promises and hype that come with a new system purchase. As ERP companies learned the hard way over the last twenty years, a system is only as good as its user adoption. Metrics cannot flow to management without individual users, on a consistent basis, doing their part. Those caught in this position are at the mercy of the original system designers. Fortunately there are some strategies that can help.

I would like to use JIRA, a project management platform from Atlassian, as an example. JIRA is one of a new generation of SaaS based, deeply configurable, business tools. I teach a class that empowers organizations to make this powerful tool their own. Reducing user friction is what I have found is the key to user adoption of a tool of this type.

Remove the clutter

An effectively designed product will present you with an incredible combination of configurable features. In the case of JIRA, you can have an almost unlimited number of:

Workflows
Fields
Issue Types
External Inputs
Outgoing Connections

When a company purchases a product with this many options, most new administrators open the floodgates to their users. Every field looks useful, and managers have a long list of things they want to track in their work. The result can be a menagerie of poorly named and organized fields that are tedious and overwhelming.

Fields are the single largest source of clutter in business apps so I will point my attack there. It is good to list out all the fields that you want. If a field is up for discussion, it must have value to some aspect of the business. There are three approaches that can be taken to reduce the number of fields presented to the user:

Present a field only at the time it will be used. If you present 50 fields at the beginning of a process, they won’t all be observed and used properly. If you present fields to users only at the moment those traits appear in the process, the screen never becomes intimidating and fields are not missed or ignored.
Prioritize. Work from the key business goals backwards to the user. When you work in this direction, it will expose obsolete and non-critical fields. These can then be eliminated or put on a secondary screen.
Combine related fields into combination elements. Often a flat set of fields can be placed into a hierarchy. A hierarchy is far more approachable to a user than a flat list. Related fields are attacked together instead of needing to be found.
Relate fields to particular issue types. Just as common as fields that have no relevance, are fields that have a default value for many issue types that rarely changes.

Similar ideas can be applied to other complex work processes common in business applications.

Push your user toward action

In every task within every job there is a context, and a certain set of information that is needed. System designers have learned to present the information the user needs at a particular point in the work process. There are many mechanisms in a JIRA workflow to assist with this. The most powerful is the idea of screens associated with transitions in a workflow.

In a JIRA workflow there are Statuses and Transitions, the primary building blocks of the workflow. I always describe Statuses as places of rest, with Transitions being the action of moving between those places of rest. When new administrators first build a workflow, they INEVITABLY focus on the statuses. After about the third try, they realize that transitions are where the action is, literally and figuratively.

Focusing on the transitions, or forward movement, means giving users the ability to speed up their work by making the important information available. A major caveat here: do not take away access to all the other fields and information. For example, it is common to “pop” a screen on a transition. If you do so, add a tab to the screen with quick access to all the fields and information. This will allow users to correct previous mistakes or misunderstandings without disrupting their workflow.

Business systems commonly are based around a workflow. Try to understand what moves your user forward in their daily efforts and push it forward in their view.

Focus, focus, focus

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of this in any organization. We often preach focus in the business world but then we constantly break our workers’ focus throughout the day. I have written pretty extensively about workflow design and the need for focus. Here are a couple of points.

If you have task-driven work, then always present the user with task-oriented workflow transitions and statuses. It is common for a workflow to start out being about tasks and end up being focused on deadlines and time. This confuses users and causes them to have to think harder than they should to stay focused.

Maintaining user focus is an area where user personas are quite valuable to the person configuring a system. If the administrator has a good understanding of a particular job, and can visualize what that user is going through, they will build a better system.

Listen and empower

Pride of authorship can be devastating to a system. Every organization is different, and your users matter. Listen to them and iterate on your workflows. Provide a mechanism, often another JIRA project, where users can make suggestions. Ask your users to critique screens and provide feedback about ways to improve their productivity.

Erring on the side of empowerment early in a system implementation can be the difference in making or breaking system adoption. It is common to want to restrict access early on and only give access when needed. This is very frustrating to users and I have witnessed the abandonment of systems over this particular issue. Users need to get their jobs done, and they will resort to Excel to make it happen! Once they abandon using a system because of restricted access it is very difficult to turn things around.

Conclusions

The success of implementing JIRA, or other extensive business systems, is like any other endeavor. It goes better with a proactive plan that considers implications rather than reacts to them. A system is only as good as the data entered, and a user that is empowered by a system will enter far more accurate and complete information than a user that must simply comply. By using these strategies you can chart the path to system adoption rather than abandonment.

Iterative Thinking is a Lifestyle

A student in a recent JIRA Boot Camp commented on how I described agile processes differently than a consultant her company had brought in. She noted that what I described seemed to make more sense. This got me thinking about those differences, why our approaches were different, and why it should matter.

I read a lot and I see lots of commentary on agile software development. In many of the discussions the dialog is often very detailed, laced with procedure and process. This style of explanation leads to reactionary implementations that may not be well thought through. These implementations are like a thin coat of paint on a hard surface. It looks pretty but it does not go very deep. Companies that go down this path usually have a history of other such implementations of new ideas. Employees are used to it and respond with a surface change that only lasts until the next idea comes along or until nobody is looking.

When I think about agile, continuous improvement, iterative project management, etc., I view these as tools to accomplish my goals. They are not the end all solution but a screwdriver to improve the productivity of my team. I do not blindly follow a methodology, I strategically apply these tools to accomplish my goals.

I decided when I was very young, watching various members of my grandparents generation, that I wanted to be a lifelong learner. I did not know what that meant at the time, but I knew I wanted to be like the intellectually engaged, vibrant seniors that I knew. I did not want to be stuck in a small personal world inhabited by a few people and the television set.

As a young engineer, many of the lean, downsizing focused approaches to business did not seem healthy to me. These were epitomized in the story of “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap and his approach to turning around companies. I was far more interested in what companies like Toyota and other leaders in “Lean Manufacturing” were learning. They seemed to be pushing for elimination of waste and just in time approaches that did not squeeze more production out of less but optimized the production of the staff you have. That was a mouthful so let me explain.

The Chainsaw approach cuts as much as possible, “cut to the bone” is the mantra. Toyota on the other hand pushed to improve their staff, processes, quality and production through a cycle of implementation, feedback, and adjustment. This was my first attraction to iterative change and I have adopted it as a way of life. I approach my business, my behavior, my hobbies, and my relationships with an idea that I can improve and get better.

Back to my student and her question. The reason I sound different is that an iterative approach is my way of life, not a process I promote. Agile is a process that has elements that really do improve the performance of teams. But like any tool it is not one size fits all. There are a number of agile principles we do not follow in my company, because they do not apply to our business. There are many that we do follow. We pick and choose when and how we use agile principles because we see it as a tool, not a religion, or something to sell.

Many consultants make a living selling agile processes. Most of them are quite good but a few will try to force ideas that do not make sense on an organization. These few are very much like some of our political leaders today. They want you to follow without understanding based on a promised result. This is not a way to run a business!

As much as I like the agile way, I love the Baldrige Continuous Improvement Model(CIP). I believe it is the missing tool that helps the agile processes sink into the organization. Much more like paint permeating a porous surface. Paint on such a surface is very difficult to remove, this is the way you want good processes to be absorbed by your organization. Following the CIP model helps you focus on building up your staff, helping them grow and become lifelong learners. Help them achieve a new level of professionalism and/or productivity. By doing this the organization improves.

If you have been implementing agile or other ideas because it is currently the “hot” thing and promises incredible results, then I encourage you to step back and evaluate. Look at the principles, look at the processes, consider which ones will improve your organization the most, and implement them. These are tools, not black and white affairs. They are a tool to be used to achieve the goals you have for your business and if used properly they can help your employees grow. Then everyone wins.

JIRA: A Fluid Interface

Strategies for successfully traversing the ever shifting Atlassian UI

Atlassian’s JIRA is a fascinating platform for me to use, teach about, and study. I have been working with computers since I was a child in the 80’s. My parents did not buy an Atari game machine when they were popular, we bought an Atari 400 computer. I did play games, but I had to type them in from the back of Byte magazine first.

To those who understand that last reference, we are few in number but we understand why so much works the way it does today. As I keep my eye on staying current in this field, I watch what develops in the context of the full path of the personal computer (pun intended).

In many ways, the fluid JIRA interface is a triumph of SaaS over the technical lethargy that typically comes with enterprise software. The application rapidly improves in any area the company focuses on. Missteps in design are sometimes corrected surprisingly quickly. Soft launches of new features are incredibly valuable, the new project interface is a perfect example. With the first soft launch it was horrid, now it works pretty well. With hundreds, and possibly thousands, of talented developers working on the application, the scope of the management problem is hard for many to fathom. It does yield some interesting results.

Over the last few years there have been various waves of updating the UI in JIRA and other Atlassian products. I currently see four concurrent waves of UI modernization in JIRA. I am sure some of them will not expand much further but disappear, although not without creating potential confusion for users.

This challenge hits us directly in almost every class I teach. I will regularly run into a UI change that occurs during the class or while I am traveling to a class. This leads to some interesting results when, for example, you are setting up a project and end up in the administration pages without warning. It keeps you on your toes as an instructor.

Above and below are two very different examples of interfaces to share something you create with other users.

As a prime example, many more can be found in the images throughout the article, lets look at what users manage in the system. They manage Dashboards, Filters, and Agile Boards. The important features for users are creating, editing, sharing, showing favorites, these are just a start. Yet when you compare the UI mechanisms for all three, it is very rare for the three areas to work the same way. This simply confuses users.

From my perspective, there are three types of organizations using JIRA Cloud.

Enterprises
Mid sized organizations
Small teams

Enterprises

If an Enterprise is using JIRA Cloud, they are progressive by definition. Many Enterprises could simply not overcome the internal hurdles to use an app outside of their physical control. Even a dynamic company of this size will struggle with organizational weight and will need support to keep users productive.

A key strategy I have seen implemented in this type of environment is to have a designated advocate in every organizational unit. Connect these advocates together and give them a steady flow of release notes regarding UI updates. Very quickly these staff become the first line of support for users that need help. Over time they can proactively address new updates for people they work with every day. This is more efficient than asking a training organization to hold boring classes devoted simply to UI changes, that are reminiscent of Office Space.

Mid Sized Organizations

Organizations in this size range often have less defined processes, and may not have a dedicated support team for software. Very often the IT department fills this role. Often individuals that can have very disparate job titles become the “go to” problem solver for a part of the organization. Find and recruit these people, they like helping others or they would not become that person. Empower them and let them help you.

Another approach is to use your normal notification mechanism (possibly the one built into JIRA) to notify staff of changes to the interface that will affect them. Proactive communication, if consistently delivered, can build confidence and improve productivity.

Small Teams

Teams that are using JIRA Cloud are a much simpler scenario. It does not mean that less diligence is required to keep your team productive, but the approach is different. Watch for those that are getting behind, talk within the team at lunch or during meetings about changes.

My software teams fall into this category. I try to be aware of the various generations in the teams and anticipate problems. A perfect example is Windows 8. As I watch people use it, I see a clear divide between those that use the Metro interface vs those that avoid it at all costs. This does not mean users are less capable, they have had different experiences. Instead of ignoring this, use it to your advantage. It will increase your knowledge and improve the cohesiveness of the team.

Final Thoughts

This article was written about JIRA but it really applies to all kinds of software and systems. The consistent theme here is proactive communication. None of these strategies involve one person trying to solve every problem. Engage others, increase knowledge transfer, and build consensus. These are strategies that work in many situations and circumstances.

The rapid development of new features is one of the reasons I strongly advocate for JIRA software in many situations. Atlassian has done an amazing job building up the capabilities of the system at scale in a fairly unique way. The uniqueness of this is often unexpected to users and hopefully the strategies discussed here, or some variation, can help you keep your team moving forward for many years to come.

Here is another example of UI differences within a major function of the application, editing a name.