Whether you’re working in HR, marketing, or another sector, effective project management is essential for achieving professional success on both an individual and organizational level. Atlassian is known for its top-in-class project management solution, Jira. It now offers a new version of Jira dedicated to making project management easy no matter what type of business you’re involved in: Jira Work Management. This solution boasts Jira’s trademark features for streamlining work processes, enhancing collaboration, and boosting productivity, while aiming to meet the diverse needs of organizations in almost any industry.
Let’s take a look at just what Jira Work Management offers and how to start leveraging its capabilities at your organization.
What is Jira Work Management?
Jira Work Management is a project management and work tracking tool offered by Atlassian, designed to streamline and simplify work management processes for a broader range of users. The primary purpose of Jira Work Management is to provide a user-friendly platform for teams to better organize and execute their work. It offers a simplified interface and easy-to-understand features, making it suitable for marketing, HR, operations, and other non-technical teams. Jira Work Management inherits the robust features and integrations of Jira, but democratizes access for users that may not require the complexity of Atlassian’s other Jira offerings.
Jira Work Management fosters collaboration among teams by facilitating a shared workspace where everyone involved in a project can collaborate, contribute, and monitor progress. It enhances transparency by offering real-time updates on the status of tasks and projects, enabling team members to see where their work fits into the bigger picture. This makes it easy to identify any bottlenecks or potential issues while responding quickly to changing priorities and delivering projects more efficiently.
Jira Work Management Basics
Jira Work Management is built around projects and issues. Projects are spaces where team members can collaborate on specific work items. Each work item is called an issue, categorized from discrete subtasks to wide-ranging epics that encompass several tasks. To complete issues, team members move through various workflows that your organization can customize to meet its unique needs. All of this is kept on track through the efforts of Jira administrators, who handle everything from defining user roles and permissions to creating new projects.
Jira Work Management Features and Pricing
Jira Work Management offers an array of features dedicated to improving project management. Here are a few of the most important:
- Views. Jira Work Management includes a variety of views for displaying work items and related information. These include views that display the timelines for various issues, a spreadsheet-like list of work items, and a calendar showing the issue due dates. You can also display issues organized by status in the board view.
- Templates. An impressive variety of project templates allow organizations to quickly set up projects with appropriate workflows and permissions.
- Task tracking. Jira Work Management offers a user-friendly interface that allows teams to create, assign, and track tasks effortlessly. Its kanban board view enables visual task tracking, letting team members understand the status of various tasks within a project at a glance, so they understand where they fit in and stay aligned as the project moves forward.
- Customizable workflows. Jira Work Management lets organizations create and edit custom workflows to formalize and standardize each step. Teams can tailor these workflows to match their own unique processes, ensuring that the tool adapts to their specific needs rather than the other way around.
- Task prioritization. With Jira Work Management, teams can assign priorities to tasks, enabling them to focus on high-impact activities first. This boosts the efficiency of both resource allocation and task completion.
- Collaborative capabilities. Collaboration lies at the heart of Jira Work Management. The tool provides comment sections on every issue, file attachments capabilities, and @mentions, promoting seamless communication among team members. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, minimizing misunderstandings and enhancing productivity.
- Automation. Jira Work Management includes automation capabilities that enable teams to create rule-based triggers for various actions. This reduces the chance for human error and the need for team members to manually intervene as tasks progress.
- Reporting. With an impressive suite of reporting options, teams can quickly gain insights into project progress, team performance, and overall efficiency. These reports aid in data-driven decision-making, supporting a culture of continuous improvement.
- Integrations. Team members don’t have to give up using their preferred tools when adopting Jira Work Management. It features integrations with an array of Atlassian and third-party tools, including Slack, Trello, and Google Workspace.
- Mobile accessibility. With remote and hybrid work on the rise, Jira Work Management's mobile app ensures that team members can stay connected and get work done from just about anywhere.
Jira Work Management also lets your organization take advantage of these features for free, as long as your company adds only five users or less. If your organization wants to adopt the tool at a larger scale, it will have to choose either the Standard or Premium version of Jira Work Management, which come with a monthly cost of $5 or $10 per user, respectively.
Who Should Use Jira Work Management?
Jira Work Management is intended to meet the needs of a wide range of teams and organizations. Here are some recommendations on who can get the most value from adopting this adaptable tool.
- Small to medium-sized businesses. These businesses often require a flexible and scalable project management solution that can adjust to their evolving needs. Jira Work Management's customizable workflows and collaboration features make it an ideal choice. Larger organizations should consider Jira Software and potentially Atlassian’s enterprise-level plans.
- Marketing and sales teams. Guiding customers from discovery to conversion involves a large number of tasks and processes that require careful coordination. Jira Work Management's kanban boards, task prioritization, and collaborative tools can bring order to the often-hectic pace of marketing and sales campaigns.
- Human resources. HR departments can utilize Jira Work Management to manage recruitment, onboarding, and employee performance tasks. The tool's automation features can simplify many routine HR processes as well.
- IT departments. IT teams can leverage Jira Work Management for issue tracking, bug fixes, and project management. Integrations with development tools make it an excellent choice for tech-focused teams, although Jira Software or Jira Service Desk may be a better fit for some teams in this space.
Getting Started with Jira Work Management
Jira Work Management is more straightforward to set up and use than many of Atlassian’s other offerings, but it’s still a complex, powerful piece of software. Start by signing up for the free version of Jira Work Management through Atlassian's website. After the download is complete, create a new workspace or project based on your team's requirements. Select the project template most appropriate for your company, such as "Business," "Marketing," or "Design."
You can then begin customizing a few workflows to match your company’s most common or important processes. You’ll simultaneously define issue statuses to suit these workflows, like “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Complete.” These issues will appear in the appropriate column of your team members’ kanban boards sorted by status. Finally, you can set user permissions, add users, and start creating and assigning tasks to team members. As they get going with tracking work in Jira, encourage users to collaborate whenever possible by leaving comments, helpful issue descriptions, and tagging other team members as needed.
Once you and your team have a bit of experience under your collective belts, consider using Jira Work Management’s built-in automation capabilities, along with those available through its add-ons, to save even more of your team members’ precious time. From task assignments, to status changes, to notifications and more, the possibilities offered by automation in Jira are nearly endless.
To wrap up the initial stages of adopting Jira Work Management, set up a dashboard to start reviewing key metrics like the resolution time for certain types of issues or overall throughput for your team or organization. You can customize reports to focus on the data that’s most relevant to your company’s goals. And as your team continues to grow more familiar with Jira Work Management, look to additional resources, especially Atlassian Solution Partners, to ensure you’re getting the most out of your new platform.
Adopt Jira Work Management with a Trusted Partner
While Jira Work Management is designed to be more versatile and easy-to-use than Atlassian’s other offerings, it still offers its share of complexity that can make onboarding your team difficult, let alone taking full advantage of its many features. That’s why it makes so much sense to leverage the experience of an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner like Contegix. Its team of Atlassian experts can help ensure you pay only for the Jira license you need, your team members quickly get up to speed on all of Jira’s useful capabilities, and your Jira deployment stays aligned with your organization’s unique business needs.
Contact Contegix today to see how they can help your company drive sustained success with project management using Jira Work Management.