Jira Software

• JIRA is an excellent tool to connect different teams and work styles in an efficient way, without being too specific for some of them.
• It has a lot of features and settings to offer which really enable you to plan a task in a very detailed way.
• Thanks to the different conditions of a task, the status can be tracked easily and everyone always knows who's the one who has to provide input.

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• Atlassian recently made a number of UI changes to both JIRA and Confluence. The Confluence changes negatively impact productivity by hampering what used to be a relatively straightforward navigation process. JIRA received an analogous set of changes; while less egregious, I find the new look increases my eye strain when trying to find needed information. New users may not have as much difficulty, but you should try it for yourself.
• Atlassian offers both a Cloud and on-premise solution; the Cloud version doesn't offer many customizations and plugins that are present on the on-prem (server) version.
• The amount of customization offered by JIRA is a blessing and a curse. Generally speaking, it's important to keep things as simple as possible; avoid adding custom fields or super involved workflows as much as possible (though the default workflow doesn't work in most situations based upon my experience).
• You'll need to nominate someone in your organization to own the JIRA effort -- this person should have a reasonable knowledge of JIRA administration but also have the ability to fairly present options and solutions as issues arise. If you don't have someone in this org but opt for a committee of sorts your instance can become a true mess and will negatively impact productivity.

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• As a product manager I needed to make sure that all teams were aware of priority and that new items went through triage and were accounted for in a timely manner. JIRA took us away from the headache of spreadsheets and daily meetings, to one transparent system with real time dashboards that required no meetings. People could just do their work because they knew what was the next most important item. This must have saved hundreds of thousands of hours over the years.

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