Management involvement in implementation of Jira in organisation

[Anders Hebert]

Unsure if this is the correct place for this topic.. it's mainly about implementation, change management and management involvement:

I have been implementing Jira in our organisation for the last year or so. Slowly and steadily increasing the number of departments and users. I have now passed a tipping-point and have approx 75-80% of employees using Jira (actively within the last 5 days). We are approx 100 employees. Confluence has also steadily increased in usage, to complement Jira-projects. We also have external consultants/suppliers in some Jira-projects. So this has grown bottom-up, by employees and with my support, training, customization of projects, etc. 

Just about all of the middle managers are onboard, but senior management have been very distant and so far quiet uninterested (and do not use Jira/Confluence at all). All the managers backed and communicated internally that everyone in the organisation shall use Jira - but after that they have shown little support or interest in the progress or their roll. I have therefore invited myself to their meeting to give an update and explore their roll in this. Partly to be positive ambassadors for this change in ways-of-working, but also how they could benefit by using Jira and/or Confluence in their work (which today is very Excel-based).

I would love to hear thoughts or suggestions  (or links to any published articles) on how to involve senior management more in the roll-out:

How to measure this roll-out/implementation

I want the management team to understand how employees use Jira and Confluence, and how this benefits the organisation (rather than before, when everyone worked in different ways). How having the data in one place can help them as senior management. How goals and production is measured.

Also I wish to explore how the senior management team could use Jira and/or Confluence for their work.

[Rik de Valk]

Hi @Anders Hebert , 

Senior managers have different needs than the teams and their team leads. They don't really care that the minions have a new toy to play with 😉

So I think you should ask yourself the question: what keeps a senior manager up at night? And how does this Jira implementation make them sleep better at night? 

• Are we increasing efficiency? Can we measure that and report that somehow? 
• Are we aligning our team's work to their strategic goals in a better way? Can we show that somehow? 
• Are we creating more insight in the progress and bottlenecks in the change portfolio? Can we show that to them? 

When it comes to the actual interest of senior management in using Jira: It is not common for senior managers to actually log-in to Jira. So it might also be required to surface the Jira data in some business intelligence tool (Tableau, PowerBI, QlikView and the like), so that it can be incorporated in management information dashboards.  

Have a nice day! Rik 

[Anders Hebert]

Thank you Rik, for very a relevant perspective about addressing their needs. The difficulty I see is actually how to measure this, as KPI's or similar. So far I had only considered the number/percentage of active users in the organisation as part of the implementation stage.  I have no measurement regarding the efficiency, insights and goal-alignment from "before" the implementation, so nothing to measure or compare with. Also being a mid-size NGO we are lacking in areas such as formal workflows and processes.

I have considered suggesting that senior management to try to use Confluence for documenting meetings and prioritizing topics and agendas for their meetings - and follow-ups, thereafter (as a 2nd step) to create issues or tag employees for tasks that are a result of a decision or need.

[Rik de Valk]

If no measurements have been available, than Jira might be able to help to GET this insight. You won't have a baseline, but at least you can start getting insight into some simple measures such as: 

1. Number of issues completed per month
2. Time to resolution of Epics

And n a mid-size company it might be valuable for senior management to get insight in Epic level planning and status. So maybe create a dashboard with: 

1. Epics done last month
2. Epics with a due date in coming month
3. Open Impediments

And on that 3rd point: if you're not yet doing this, start having the teams working with Impediments (new Issue type). Have them log any issue that is blocking their progress in a project or process. And enable teams to 'escalate' impediments if the resolution is out-of-their hands. Than management can get involved in these escalated impediments that teams themselves cannot resolve. 

This creates an involvement of management in making the teams more productive. 

Anyway... This topic is too complex to tackle via the community for your specific company. But these are just some pointers that come to mind :)

Cheers, Rik 

[Anders Hebert]

Thanks again Rik, for very insightful comments and suggestions - much appreciated!

Are you aware if there are any other forums where these discussions exist (outside of this community) - some sort of change-management/implementation group community or forum?

[Rik de Valk]

Not sure to be honest.