Is JIRA the right choice for my company?

[Barret_Wallace]

Hi,

we are a service provider in the IT business and want to improve our the way we work. I stumbled upon JIRA and wonder, whether it would be a good idea for us to try it or rather not. Thus, I would really appreciate your realistic opinion. This is what we do:

- Account management:

Other divisions of our company contact us in order to create accounts for new employees, grant certain permissions, etc. Perhaps, JIRA’s help desk functions may be useful for standardizing the whole process!?

- Procurement:

Other divisions also ask us to organize new hard- or software. In a rather complex process, we have to check if this is really necessary, if it’s within our budget, etc. Then, we have to order the product(s), inventory it, manage the software licenses and so on. Perhaps JIRA can make the whole process more traceable and faster.

- General inquiries:

The head of our division receives a lot of different inquiries such as “prepare a certain report”. He may then have to delegate certain subtasks to other division members in order to finalize the report. Maybe JIRA can work as a task management system here.

- Create reports:

In order to improve our services, it may be useful to see, for instance, how the average time it takes until a certain procurement request is completed. Or how many training courses are requested and how many of them are approved by us. Maybe JIRA can help us to create such reports.

I’m impressed of JIRA’s capabilities as a complex workflow engine. However, we usually don’t have “projects” in a sense that they have a clearly defined finite state. Instead, we rather have areas (like “procurement”). Would you recommend JIRA for those purposes? Or do you think that they are too far away from JIRA is supposed to be used for?

Any comment is greatly appreciated!

[LUC FILION]

Hello Barret,

JIRA and several add-on can be quite useful for managing processes. We do use it for most of our customers, deploy JIRA and map engineering processes into it. JIRA can always be "bent" so that it does what you need. When you get out of engineering, then this becomes less the case. This is because other department, may find the interface difficult to understand. They will need proper training (adapted to what they use in JIRA' and not those general JIRA trainings).

The main advantage would be that everything is centralized into JIRA. This is great for everybody a company. One of our client is currently reomving SharePoint, and replacing it with Confluence.

--> User Management and permission are always difficult to do. Atlassian offers that in a quite interesting way I find. Depending on what you wish to do, it may be a good solution.

--> JIRA would not cover all the Procurement activities you wish to do. Confluence may be added as a wiki to help collecting information.

--> All inquiries become a Task - which can be categorized for better management. Very Powerful.

--> For an IT company like yours, it won't be difficult to create your own JIRA reports. This should be a very handful feature.

To what I can understand, JIRA is more or less likely to cover all your needs. BUt you will always find something. One of my client uses Confluence for managing ... meeting minutes. And that's it! Still very powerful!

Good luck Barret,

Luc

[Andris Grinbergs]

You should really try out Jira. Jira is frequently used for such processes. Sometimes some precesses should be adjusted a bit to fit Jira, but it's still one of the most efficient solutions.