Tag: automation

Coming Soon – Jira Service Management: Administration

My new Jira Service Management: Administration course is now available! Take the course on LinkedIn now.

Not a LinkedIn Learning member yet? Start your 30 day LinkedIn Learning free trial! Access to my courses and others is included with your Premium subscription!

About the Course

Jira Service Management (JSM) is built on Jira and extends it so your organization can effectively manage incidents, problems, changes, and service requests.  Jira Service Management takes support to the next level with queues, SLAs, a simple interface for your customers, and integration with Confluence as a knowledgebase.

In this course, you’ll learn how to set up and administer Jira Service Management so customers can create requests, support agents can provide the help users need, and leadership can measure effectiveness.

In this administration course, you’ll learn:

  • How JSM extends Jira with support-specific features
  • The additional types of users and responsibilities
  • Using JSM for incident management, change management, problems, service requests, and support
  • How to configure request types, permissions, and notifications
  • How to configure the customer portal and connect to a Confluence knowledgebase for self-service
  • How to create, manage, and troubleshoot service level agreements (SLAs)
  • Using automation to reduce manual work and repetitive tasks
  • How to leverage reporting to gauge effectiveness and measure customer satisfaction

“Considering application health, the user experience, and finding a balance between them is the difference between a good administrator and a great one.”
– Rachel Wright

Advanced Jira Administration: Getting into the Scheme of Things

A practical example for a development project

Let’s say you create specific Jira issue types because you want to collect a different data set for each type, and because want the different issue types to use different workflows. So what do you do next? How do you tell Jira what information to collect for each issue type? Should you create screens or a field configuration scheme first? What’s the difference between an issue type scheme and an issue type screen scheme? How do you associate an issue type with a workflow?

Understanding Jira schemes and how they interact with each other is one of the most important, and most challenging parts of Jira administration. My new Advanced Jira Administration course will help you understand:

  • The nine different Jira schemes and what each one does
  • Where to find the schemes used by a given project
  • The hierarchal relationship between screen schemes and issue type screen schemes
  • The correct order for creating screens, screen schemes and issue type screen schemes
  • How to remove a screen, screen scheme or issue type screen scheme
  • How to share schemes across multiple projects
  • When and how to create custom schemes
  • And much more
The course contains challenges, quizzes, downloadable handouts, and personal stories.

In this course, we’ll discuss real-life Jira scheme examples, areas where it’s easy to go wrong, and best practices for creating and managing schemes. The course includes clear explanations, demonstrations, and challenges (with solutions!) to try in your Jira application.

Once you understand Jira schemes you’ll have the keys to unlock Jira efficiency and scaleability.

Rachel Wright’s Jira Courses on LinkedIn

Not a LinkedIn Learning member yet? Start your 30 day LinkedIn Learning free trial! Access to my courses and others is included with your Premium subscription!

New Course – Jira: Advanced Administration

Jira: Advanced Administration with Rachel Wright
Take “Jira: Advanced Administration” with Rachel Wright

Life is short. Jira is complex. There simply isn’t time to make all of the mistakes and learn everything you need to know by trial and error. I’ve compiled over eight years of lessons learned in my Jira Basic and Advanced Administration courses. The advanced course is available now on LinkedIn! It will help you navigate the complexities of Jira and find the right balance between user support and application functionality. Take this course to correctly configure your application and make sure it stays clean, manageable, and flexible.

Course Structure

The Jira: Advanced Administration course picks up where the Jira: Basic Administration course leaves off. The advanced course is designed to help you understand and internalize Jira concepts by including:

  • Real world examples of what to do, and what not to do taken from my personal experience
  • Explanations of the latest Jira jargon (ie. Company-managed projects vs team-managed projects)
  • Tips and best practices
  • Demonstrations
  • Challenges that you can try in your own Jira application
  • Quizzes to ensure understanding and build your confidence
  • Handouts
  • And more

While the examples used in the course are from Jira Software, the lessons can also be applied to Jira Service Management and Jira Work Management projects. All deployment types (Cloud, Server, and Data Center) are included.

Course Content

The course takes a deep dive into topics such as configuring global permissions, understanding scheme hierarchy, creating custom schemes and custom workflows, managing project settings, working with groups and roles, and controlling access to information.  

Your job as a Jira administrator is to give your teams the functionality they need and ensure the long term health of your Jira application. We’ll discuss when and how to make customizations and how to choose from the thousands of available Jira apps and extensions.

Finally, we’ll also look at advanced Jira features such as creating issues from email and issue collectors, importing data into your Jira instance, and streamlining process with automation.

Knowing the best way to solve a problem and how it will impact your application in the future is the difference between a good Jira administrator and a great one. If you’re a newly minted Administrator, an experienced JA looking for guidance on taming an overgrown Jira instance, or a determined perfectionist who’s trying to set things up right the first time – then this course is for you!

Rachel Wright’s Jira Courses on LinkedIn

Not a LinkedIn Learning member yet? Start your 30 day LinkedIn Learning free trial! Access to my courses and others is included with your Premium subscription!

Coming Soon – Jira: Advanced Administration

My new Jira: Advanced Administration course is now available! Take the course on LinkedIn now.

Not a LinkedIn Learning member yet? Start your 30 day LinkedIn Learning free trial! Access to my courses and others is included with your Premium subscription!

About the Course

Jira is the industry standard for tracking work, tasks, and strategic company initiatives.  The software is infinitely flexible and customizable, which is both a blessing and a curse.  The goal of the Jira administrator should be to configure application settings to support the needs of the organization and ensure the health of the application in the future.  This requires an intimate understanding of Jira’s capabilities, global options, and scheme configuration.

In this advanced Jira administration course, you’ll learn:

  • The most important configuration options like general settings and global permissions
  • How schemes work together to power Jira projects
  • How to create custom projects, issue types, workflows, screens, and custom fields
  • How to manage project-specific settings like components and versions
  • Working with groups and roles for easy user management
  • How to restrict access and share information with permission, issue security, and notification schemes
  • Ways to extend Jira with apps, connections, and integrations
  • Advanced features like importing data, creating issues from email, adding custom events, and automation
  • And more

“Knowing the best way to solve a problem and how it will impact your application in the future is the difference between a good administrator and a great one.”
– Rachel Wright

Jira Automation Ideas

In case you need some inspiration, here are 65 ways you can use automation in Jira to make your life easier. You can accomplish all of these with built-in automation, workflow extensions, and scheduling apps!

Communicate Information

Send additional notifications

  • Notify the project manager when an initiative is approved
  • Notify customers when their feedback or bug is addressed
  • Alert the legal and customer service teams when a new product launches
  • Use an integration or a webhook to notify your team’s chat room of certain Jira events

Send weekly updates

  • Send a report of all the issues you worked on this week

Show instructions

  • Provide an on-screen message, after a workflow transition, to remind a user to perform a task they frequently forget to do

Automatically create issues

  • When product features change, automatically create an issue for the legal team to revise the terms of service
  • When there’s an outage, automatically notify customer service so they can be ready to address trouble reports
  • If a customer support request requires development work, auto create the issue and assign it to the right team lead

Add watchers

  • Automatically add previous assignees as watchers

Add comments

  • Add a comment to any automatically closed issues, explaining why and how to reopen issues if needed
  • Add a canned response based on a label

Communicate requirements

  • Require users to link issues to their related initiative
  • Automatically remind business owners to attach project requirements

Update Information

Automatically update issues based on certain criteria

  • Assign issues based on custom field data like a certain skill needed or a specific office location
  • Automatically assign issues to users in a list
  • Add high priority bugs to the “Next unreleased version”
  • Set a due date based on a creation date
  • Update issues based on a JQL result
  • Automatically log work on a workflow transition
  • Update information in a child issue with information from the parent
  • Automatically update the due date for all linked issues

Automatically transition issues

  • If a code review is rejected in Crucible, automatically transition the Jira issue back to “To Do” status and notify the developer that there’s a problem
  • If a code branch is created in Bitbucket, automatically transition the Jira issue from the “To Do” status to the “In Progress” status
  • Automatically reopen a closed issue if a customer adds a comment
  • Close an Epic when it’s Stories are closed
  • Close all Sub-tasks when a Task is abandoned

Conditionally update issues

  • Only update issues with a specific priority level
  • Only update issues with a certain component selected

Log additional details

  • When an approval is given, add the user’s name and the timestamp to custom fields, to easily see and report on that information

Automatically increment a number field each time an event occurs

  • Count how many times an issue went into the “On Hold” status, was reopened, or was reassigned

Repeat Frequent Tasks

Create issues on a specific or recurring schedule

  • Automatically create all scheduled maintenance tasks each quarter
  • Automatically create all regression testing tasks
  • Clone an issue each week for the next two years

Create issues based on components

  • For each new hire, automatically create an issue for each application or resource the user needs
  • For each new product, automatically create all the marketing tasks

Create reminders

  • Create sub-tasks to remind yourself to log time at the end of each week
  • Remind the customer to verify their request is resolved
  • Remind the assignee to review an issue not updated in the last two days

Calculate information

  • Automatically calculate the hardware purchase cost based on quantity
  • Automatically calculate the level of effort based on estimates
  • Automatically calculate the mileage fee based on travel miles
  • Automatically calculate the training cost based on number of requests
  • Sub all logged time for an initiative

Create related issues

  • When a request requires development work, automatically create an issue for the dev team and link it to the customer request

Sync Information

Updated related issues

  • When information changes in a parent task automatically update the child task
  • Use regex to find issues mentioned in other fields and automatically link them together

Sync data between multiple Jira applications

  • Sync information once an hour or once a day

Sync data with other tools

  • When case details are added in Salesforce, automatically provide that information in the related Jira issue
  • Automatically create requests from emails or chat conversations

Perform Maintenance

Delete old data

  • Automatically delete old attachments to free up space or for compliance reasons

Schedule admin tasks

  • Periodically look for changes in the list of users with application administrator access

Close old issues

  • Schedule a JQL query to find all bugs older than 2 years and automatically close them
  • Close all requests not updated by the customer in 7 days

Close duplicate issues

  • When an incomplete issue is linked as a dupe, automatically transition the issue to “Done”

Send Alerts

Meet deadlines

  • Find overdue tasks and alert the project manager
  • Notify agents of approaching SLA deadlines
  • Alert the hiring manager one week before a new hire arrives
  • Send an alert when a project reaches 80% of it’s budget

Manage missing information

  • Alert an employee if their expense reimbursement issue is missing receipt attachments
  • Alert a project manager if an important task is missing approval

Surface high priority information

  • Send alerts for high priority bugs, incidents, or impactful issues
  • Detect and alert users to specific problems or key phrases

Catch undesired behavior

  • Detect the word “password” to make sure a user hasn’t exposed their credentials
  • Catch users skipping the QA test step before work is deployed to production

Have more ideas? Share them in the comments section below!