Page Comparison

Problem

Jira is the acknowledged market leader among project management tools and is a great tool for managing tasks, their requirements, and life cycle. In a regular Jira workflow, project manager’s tool set for ensuring speed and quality of the delivery are limited to task description (i.e well-designed input, requirements, and quality criteria), as well as intelligent assignments.

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Maintaining the kind of knowledge needed to make efficient and unbiased assignments, leveraging team potential efficiently becomes a significant challenge under the conditions of rapid growth, fast-paced projects, and evolving technologies .

Solution

Adding “skills” as an abstraction between your tasks and your workers allows you to significantly simplify management for both:

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• You can share work queues between teams and reduce or avoid idle resources by having workers from multiple teams process other team’s tasks that don’t require project-specific expertise

• You can easily scale your team without work orchestration becoming a bottleneck by eliminating manual effort

• You get higher speed/quality ratio by guaranteeing that every task is implemented by an expert who already has all it takes to deliver the task efficiently.

  • Skill-based assignments paradigm naturally separates work concerns from training concerns. You get clear view into skill gaps (team or individual) and can make conscious decisions about how to address them. Be it training, hiring, or conscious compromise by assigning to an insufficiently qualified worker and letting him learn on the job.

• You can restrict self-assignment to experts only

• You always see who has the skills/knowledge the task or set of tasks require

• You can implement fully-automated push- or pull-style work assignments (e.g. based on expertise and availability)

  • Also relevant in cases of mergers and acquisitions

• Team incentive into learning (e.g. by calculating bonuses based on completed task expertise requirements)

• Naturally maintained product knowledge map

• Risk mitigation by deciding what knowledge needs to be documented or transferred based on skill/knowledge scarcity in order to avoid knowledge loss.

• Team can be is incentivised into learning (e.g. by calculating bonuses based on completed tasks expertise requirements)

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“Skills for Jira” adds a new custom field type - “Skillset”. These fields match the specified skill requirements with users, exposing this mapping for you to query via JQL or use in Jira workflow conditions.

“Skillset” can become be merely a convenience helper (show me who has the required skills/knowledge so that I can make a better assignment decision) or an enabler for fully automated assignments (e.g. people get their personal work queue in the form of a JQL filter , can pull their next assignment from the ones that match their expertise, and are restricted from pulling tasks they don’t have expertise insorted by priority and filtered by their expertise, which can be used for pulling or pushing next assignments).