Business Process Automation Using JIRA

by Garth Leavey on May 5, 2016

Processes, Processes, Processes... Large companies live and die by their processes.

They are needed for many reasons but do we really need to spend countless hours training people on processes that have very little to do with them?
Other than gathering everyone into a stuffy boardroom, and droning on about the approvals and other requirements that are of no concern to the audience it is generally a colossal waste of money.

In large enough companies you must follow long and complicated processes to do very simple work tasks, and on top of that you are expected to learn these processes by osmosis or bumbling around asking people where to send approvals etc. Too Confusing, Slow, and just outright bothersome.

We have started taking large and extremely complicated processes that coordinate teams to perform very intricate work involving approvals, QA, and integration tasks on mission critical equipment. The process itself is complicated but to the end users it is simple. This is because we have automated it with JIRA!

They are no longer looking at large forms try to decipher what pieces of information they are responsible for. When the JIRA issue gets to them, the forms are customized to gather only the information that individual is intended to deliver. What was once a complicated process with many moving pieces becomes a well oiled assembly line.

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Previously, SharePoint calendars were used to determine what work was scheduled and if there were any conflicts. It worked at first. Then it got out of hand and would need to be expanded to simply see a small portion of what was happening. Outside of this, approvals and QA tasks were done through email and walking around searching for elusive approvers... People would often not find the next person for the process to proceed, halting the process with no visibility as to it's status or whereabouts.

We changed everything when we started building them into JIRA workflows!!

All of sudden Engineers would receive a notification that they needed to update a drawing and they would perform their update and submit it back into the tool, and on it went, to the next stage of the process!!! It got to the point where the users did not even need to know the EVIL process and could just focus on their work. The reason you hired them!!

Business Process automation with JIRA comes with many added benefits. Once users start using dashboards to monitor their work they become far more efficient. They can plan their schedule based on upcoming work, Work tasks can be prioritized by simply dragging them into place, custom email notifications can detail exactly what the task at hand requires.

I believe we can automate any business process in JIRA and improve business performance and you should too!

Topics: Blog, Business Automation, JIRA