How to use Jira to perfom a task by agile.

[Oliver Akam]

As a Systems Administrator I need to learn how to use JIRA to determine and track my tasking and show my progress. Any suggestion guys ? I am new to Jira and I am actually doing this by agile.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you want to be "agile" about this, then I would gather your team together, agree how you want to work, and then create a Jira project from the most appropiate template (Scrum or Kanban are by far the main candidates).

The tracking and reporting will generally fall out of this naturally, but you'll want your team lead (scrum master if you choose scrum-ish stuff) to spend a bit of time with your Jira admin to make sure the desired reporting happens.

[Derek Fields (RightStar)]

A slightly different answer than @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- - In my experience, most system administrators are working on isolated tasks. Those tasks may have dependencies, but generally they are just a list of different tasks that other people have requested such as creating new users, adding disk space, upgrading software, restoring a backup, adding a new CPU, creating a new VM, etc. etc.

In this case, I recommend that you adopt a Kanban method, whether it is at the individual level (you are a "team" of one) or for the entire team. From your post, I am assuming that you want to use Jira as your own personal Kanban board that you will maintain but will be visible to other people so that they can see the size of your backlog, what is in progress, what has been completed, etc. However, everything I say below applies equally well to a team (except the WIP limits will be higher)

Depending on how you work, you can allow other people to create your tasks via email or directly in Jira, or you can create them yourself. The Backlog is where you prioritize the tasks. Then you work from the top of the backlog. You should set a Work In Progress (WIP) limit of 1 for In Progress work and have a "Pending" status for work that you are waiting for some outside input such as clarification or delivery of hardware or whatever that is outside of your control. I like to put a WIP limit on Pending as well because I don't want that to get out of hand either. When Pending gets too large, it starts to look like the "Sword of Damocles" hanging over your head.

You work on the task In Progress until it is either Done or you put it into Pending. Then you pull the next task at the top of the Backlog into In Progress and work on that. When a Pending task becomes available again, I move it to the top of the Backlog so it gets priority as the next task in line.  

Make your board visible to anyone who needs to see how much work you have to do. As you develop some history, you will be able to generate some reports that will start to show how long it takes for an issue from the time it enters your Backlog to the time it is Done ("Lead Time"). This will help your "customers" to get visibility into when their tasks will be finished. If the Lead Time is too long, you will have history to support a request for additional staff to address the bottleneck.

Long answer - hope it is helpful.

[Oliver Akam]

Thanks a lot Derek. Your explanation wasn't long and it is very helpful. It's answered some of the questions I had. I am new to this process and m team has created these backlogs and assigned to me. Any more clarifications would be helpful.

Thanks.