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Modern. Fast. Mobile. Simple. JIRA 6
We have just upgraded our own JIRA instance to the latest version of 6.0.1 over the last weekend. And this week, our team members are giving positive feedback with the new features in JIRA 6.
Fresh Look
The JIRA interface has been revamped significantly according to the Atlassian Design Guidelines. Initially, there is a slight learning curve trying to find the buttons and links. After a while, we find that it is easier to find information and do common tasks.
Detailed View
The newly introduced Detailed View is one of my favourite feature. Now, it is much easier to work with set of issues without having to switching between Issue View and Issue Navigator. This really saves a lot of time.
JIRA Mobile
While it has been possible to view JIRA on my iPhone previously, the new mobile view for JIRA make it easier to use JIRA on the go. The interface is finger friendly for common tasks and is comparable to a native mobile app. And the best thing – it is free.
More…
For other features, please refer either to the JIRA 6.0 release notes or the video below
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Why People Choose JIRA
A picture tells a thousand words on why JIRA is used by nearly 20,000 teams, spanning 115 countries around the globe. The tool that makes a difference.
For more details, you can refer to this blog post – Make Growth Easy: Why People Choose JIRA 6
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Improving productivity by encouraging suggestions from the ground
One of the best ways for improving the productivity of the company is to get suggestions from the employees. This is because they will be able to identify the tasks and processes that is causing them more work and time.
However, as shown in the video below, most employees are less prone to voicing out their suggestions. This is more obvious with the Asian culture. Another common reason is because they feel their suggestions are not followed up.
There are a few ways to encourage them
- Giving recognition to those who provided good suggestions
- Follow up on the good suggestions
- Provide them with an easy platform to submit their suggestions
- Allow them to vote on suggestions
- Allow them to comment and refine on their suggestions
- Let them know why their suggestions are not adopted eventually
For existing JIRA users, this can be easily done by creating a new project with an Suggestion issue type. Fellow team members can come in to comment and vote on those suggestions that can benefit them.
The manager can also enforce a simple workflow to track whether the suggestion is under review, approved or implemented. He can also view statistics via the JIRA dashboards.
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Will your data always be there?
People tend to believe that Web operators will keep their data safe in perpetuity
This sentence from Technology Review’s article – Fire in the Library is a good reminder on how vulnerable we are with our data and the useful information stored on the Web.
Try out this test by answering the following questions:
- You posted your photos online to share with your friends
- You posted status updates on a social network
- You write a blog
- You have a personal web page
- You put your documents online
- You posted some stuff in an online forum
- You signed up for Google Wave
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Dementia in the Organization
Photo by dierk schaefer (Flickr)
A recent study has indicated that memory decline sets in as early as 45 years old. This has influenced me to commit to more exercises and healthy food to delay its on-coming. Like many other knowledge workers, our memory and thinking skills are essential to our meaning in life.
It will be interesting to examine how Dementia are taking place in the Organization
- When does the Organization starts losing memory?
- What are the implications of memory loss
- What are the possible means to minimize memory loss?
1. When does he starts losing memory
An organization does not need to wait for 45 years. It starts losing memory as soon as it is born. It takes place when
- the employees forget about it
- the employees leave the Organization
- the computer is infected by viruses or crashed
- the documents are shredded or the files deleted
2. What are the implications of memory loss
It will depends on the nature of the Organization. A knowledge-based organization will be more severely affected.
Some of the implications are
- Loss of customers due to poor service level and not following up
- Loss of productivity due to additional rework required
- Loss of opportunities due to inability to build on existing knowledge
3. What are the possible means to minimize memory loss
While it is not totally possible to avoid memory loss, there are also ways akin to exercises and healthy food which the organization can use to minimize memory loss.
- Promote staff retention
- Embed important knowledge into the work processes (e.g checklists, templates) to prevent people from missing them out
- Put in place a Knowledge Management Strategy to identify important knowledge and how to capture them
- Encourage knowledge sharing & documentation
- Make use of systems like CRMs to track customers information, blogs to track lessons learnt/case studies, discussion forums to track ideas and discussions
- Perform backups regularly
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100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 2) – How to jazz up your JIRA site
This blog post is a continuation of last week’s blog post on well designed JIRA sites.
100% JIRA (Part 2)View more presentations from Akeles Consulting.Based on our recent survey, we summarized a few tips on how you can jazz up your JIRA site.
- Logo – A logo helps to establish your identity and branding. The size of the logo should be between 50 to 90 pixels tall to be sufficiently big and yet allow enough working space on the screen. It is also possible to use a banner graphic as a logo too.
- Header Background Color – Try to use the same header background colour as your logo’s background color. You can use a color picker tool like Colorzilla.
- Navigation Bar Background Color – Likewise the navigation bar background color should use a different shades of the same color. The navigation bar text color can be changed to white or black to match the chosen color.
- Introduction Gadget – A short writeup to introduce the purpose and usage of the site to first-time users will be useful. Links to a quick guide or contact email address will even be better.
- Gadgets colour – The color of the gadgets in the system dashboard should ideally match with the navigation bar background colour
- Links to other sites – Some organizations will add links to other auxiliary sites like their corporate website or wiki. This enables the users to surf to other sites easily within all the JIRA pages.
A good design helps to establish a corporate branding and brightens up the user’s day. You can reference how other people do it with our slides and JIRA’s guide on customizing the look and feel of JIRA.
And do drop us a comment if you have revamped your JIRA sites or come across any well designed JIRA sites. We love to share it with the rest.
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100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 1)
Have you ever wondered
- Who uses JIRA?
- What are they using JIRA for?
- What content do they put on the main dashboards?
- How do they jazz up the look of JIRA for their users?
We got curious one day and ended up with lots of screenshots of nicely designed JIRA sites. And the best way to inspire more people to jazz up their sites and make JIRA more user-friendly is to show them how other folks are doing it. Hence, we decided to share 100 sites from the set.
This week, we present the first 50 sites. We will put up the second half in next week together with some tips on jazzing up your JIRA site.
100% JIRA (Part 1)View more presentations from Akeles ConsultingShare this post
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The Future of Communication…
Atlassian’s biggest product release ever is just days away. After more than a year of development, and many more years of listening to your feedback, Confluence 4.0 will deliver the fastest, richest, most intuitive content collaboration experience, ever. Confluence 4.0 takes team collaboration to a whole new level with greatly enhanced social features. It’s never been easier to bring your team in on the important conversations in Confluence.
To celebrate this monumental release Atlassian thought it was fitting to take you on a little journey that they like to call Communication Through the Ages…
Take a look, find the easter egg, and stay tuned for Confluence 4.0, the future of online content collaboration.
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The challenges of bug reporting during new system rollout
One of success factors in rolling out new IT systems is to make sure that bugs are identified and fixed quickly to minimise the impact to the business.
However there are a few key challenges to doing that
- users are frustrated
- on reporting the bugs and explaining it to the IT team
- their feedback are not acknowledged
- the IT team spends a lot of time
- understanding what the bug reported is about
- gathering additional details for them to identify the bug
- the bugs raised are not tracked and fixes
- the programmer forgot to log the bug from the phone calls/emails
- a lot of time is spent on clarifying the bugs instead of fixing them
That’s why I was impressed by a company whose IT department took the initiative to insert a “Give feedback” link under their help menu for all their systems. By clicking on it, a window will pop up for the user to key in his idea/bug report. And then the feedback will be emailed back to the system administrator.
According to them, they wanted to help the end-users to give feedback to them to improve the system.
Atlassian’s Bonfire gave me an idea to refine this bug reporting process for web-based applications
- User identifies a bug
- User click the button on their browser
- A snapshot of the current screen is taken
- User marks out the error and key in a short description of their feedback
- When the user click on the send button, the bug is logged directly to the bug-tracker
- The system details and the time of error are also captured automatically
- The bug will appear in the activity stream of their IT team’s dashboard
- The IT manager will be able to have the latest statistics and status on the bug reported via JIRA
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- users are frustrated
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When to create a new space in Confluence
In my last post, I wrote about the Akeles Space Lister Extension which can be used when there are many spaces created within Confluence. Another possible way is to avoid creating unnecessary spaces in Confluence. All Confluence administrators should have a checklist on when to create a new space in Confluence.
Spaces in Confluence are similar to folders in Windows. Each space has its independent set of permissions which allows space administrators to set who can view/edit/comment/attach/delete/export content within the space. Users can also search content specifically within the space or syndicate information with macros and the space keys.Therefore it is very tempting for users to ask for new spaces when there are new information to be shared.
The assessment criteria for a new space can be summarized under the 3 groups:
- Purpose
- Members
- Usage
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