How to simplify Jira for non-technical users

[Ruby]

I am new to Jira, although I have used other Atlassian tools before. I work at a small nonprofit org (~50 staff) and am working toward implementing Confluence as an intranet tool for us. However, it's terrible at task management, so I would love to also use Jira for this, but it has way more fields and functions than my non-technical colleagues need. 

I have been trying to hide or disable unneeded fields and it doesn't seem to be working. I would love to hear people's suggestions for how to streamline Jira in general, and/or specifically how to:

• Standardize the workflow and statuses across all organization-managed projects.
• Hide all fields related to Development, Releases, Features, Components, and Time tracking. I made a new field schema but it didn't seem to make any difference. Maybe I need to make a screen schema as well?
• When I applied my new field schema to existing projects, Kanban boards stopped displaying any issues, even though the statuses are still aligned with the columns. Any guesses as to what happened and how to fix?

Alternately, I may just point them to Trello instead or Jira! Any pros or cons of doing that?

[Ruby]

I'm happy to say I found the solution to my third bullet in this community post: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Re-Issues-are-not-displayed-on-the-board-in-a-default-se/qaq-p/1941292/comment-id/184837#M184837 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Ruby

the big advantage of Jira is definitely its flexibility; even though you may want to start with a relatively simple setup, you can gradually expand to more and more capabilities, but still have all your organisation's work organised in one place. With Trello (and other, less powerful task management tools) you will sooner or later hit a limit.

For keeping things simple, have a look at Jira Work Management, which has been built specifically for business teams, and is considered by many as somewhat of a "low barrier entry" to Jira.

Also keep an eye on the Atlassian Marketplace; depending on your exact requirements,  apps can make your team's Jira life significantly easier. Just as an example, my team and I work on an app that brings a spreadsheet-style UI into Jira and makes the transition from e.g. Excel to Jira practically seamless.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Ruby]

Thanks! I feel like I saw somewhere that you can export your data from one project and import it into another, but now I can't find any information about this. It seems like I may want to do this to bring my Jira Software projects into Work Management. Any suggestions?

[Ruby]

Never mind, I found it! (Via issue queries).