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GUIDE
How to make
data-driven decisions in Jira
A guide for agile enterprises of all sizes

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions

Jira Data Driven Decisions

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Fig 1

Creating data is easy –
we do it all the time without really realizing it.

In a few clicks you can create a fresh Jira issue, generating a whole bunch of new data in your instance.
Collecting, aggregating, and analyzing all that data – now that’s more difficult.
Actually using that data to make business decisions? A lot of organizations find that too difficult or time consuming to even try on a day-to-day basis.
It doesn’t have to be difficult, though. If you make reporting and data analysis an ordinary part of your business process, and use the right tools to do it, you’ll soon be making data-driven decisions as just another natural part of your workflow.
This is something perhaps more important to agile teams as they need data and the communication that comes with stronger data to survive and thrive.
Data isn’t just data: It breaks down siloes and fosters the communication, collaboration, and adaptability that defines the agile metholodogy.
In this guide, we will explore the benefits and challenges of data-driven decision- making for all working methodologies, the reporting options available to you within Jira and Tempo’s apps, and how to make specific types of decisions using Tempo data.

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Challenges of making data-driven decisions

No-one needs to be told why having more effective data behind your decisions is a helpful thing for your business. Better data means better outcomes, risk mitigation, happier customers, and a competitive advantage in dealing with market changes than companies without effective data.
The real issue is overcoming the roadblocks in accessing your data, actually using it to make an impact, or even just applying the data you’ve gathered in the right way.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 1 For small enterprises
Small businesses operate very fast and sometimes proper reporting ends up falling by the wayside.
Ill-informed decisions can mean moving very fast in the wrong direction and for a small business this can be fatal. Speed and agility are virtues, but a cornerstone of agile is reflecting on how to be more effective. This is something many agile teams forget because they’re so focused on delivering.
Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 2 For medium-sized enterprises
Medium-sized organizations already know the importance data analysis and reporting plays in their decision-making. The challenge is in having different teams out there using different reporting tools that may not even be integrated with their data sources. This can lead to a lack of consistency, integrity, and trust in the organization’s reporting, and less reliance on it for decisions. It can also stifle communication and collaboration between teams.

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Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 3 For large enterprises
Large enterprises face the same challenge as medium-sized ones, but on a larger scale, and the impact is longer-term. Many large companies don’t properly scale up their reporting when they scale up their business. They therefore lack the infrastructure,  capability, and visibility necessary for reports to be making any real difference on the ground.
Another problem is that many large companies are using powerful big tools because they think that, as a big company, they need them. However, they’re too complex for most people to use. As a result, companies waste money on unused tools andprocess inefficiencies that go unaddressed.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 4 For companies that are scaling up
Trying to make data-driven decisions while you are scaling up offers a number of challenges. The influx of new data from various sources can lead to discrepancies and errors, affecting decision-making accuracy.
Integrating different data sources is another challenge, particularly if your disparate systems don’t communicate effectively.
This can make it difficult to share live data across all teams and departments, limiting visibility and reducing transparency. Companies may also face challenges in upgrading their data storage, processing capabilities, and security requirements to meet the demands of a growing dataset.
While these issues can seem daunting, it doesn’t require a full overhaul of the way you and your teams work to overcome them. In fact, we’ve found you can start making effective data-driven decisions by following just three key rules.

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Addressing the challenges of data-driven decision-making in Jira

There are three main ways of addressing the challenges of making data-driven decisions, for all sizes of company, in tandem.

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1. Get all teams reporting regularly and consistently
Reporting works best when it is a habit – not just seen an activity you have to do as the cleanup from your “actual” work.
The key thing is it should be regular within the team, because irregular reporting can cause teams to keep making the same mistakes or you can fall into the mindset that reporting is something you do once in a blue moon.
Regular reporting means making mistakes becomes less of a once-a-quarter autopsy and more a way for people to feel connected to their overall goal, feel responsible collectively for work, and ensure no big surprises land on people and things get blown out of proportion.
This is probably the biggest hurdle agile teams come up against. Teams can feel that it is a waste of their time or not part of their job description.
However, these reports don’t have to be the same for every team in the organization, as a team’s work methodology, stakeholders, and the nature of the reports they need to look at will dictate the reporting cadence.
For example, a scrum team like software development should be reporting before, during, and after each sprint. A waterfall team like senior management are more likely to be reporting monthly or quarterly.

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2. Get everybody using the same tools
Ideally you want everyone in your organization using Jira and Jira add-ons for work management, from development and IT to marketing and sales to senior management. If everyone’s working on the same instance, and using the same add-ons, it’s much easier to communicate and share data effectively.

Specifically:

  • You can compare data and reports as those report will share the same structure, design, and format.
  • If your users like a report that another team created, they can copy it.
  • Everybody’s data will be up to date and accessible.
  • People won’t come to different conclusions from the same data just because it’s presented differently.
  • Everyone will benefit from the same level of support no matter what team they work with.
  • You will improve transparency, integrity, and communication across the whole organization.

On top of that, to be successfully agile – you  need to be more centralized. Planning sprints,understanding project priority, and being able to iterate and constantly improve your workflows will only be more difficult if your teams are all working in different places, with different types of data, and in different ways.
We all want our teams to work in the ways that are the most comfortable, but moving to different  tools and ways of working will always slow things down in the short term as people learn.

There will be resistance, that’s why you need to communicate the benefits of tools clearly, show why you are doing the changes you are doing, and pick the easiest (and most effective) tool for the job.
If you want organizational autonomy for different brands or regions, you might want to look into if an entire separate division could benefit from using other tools, but size shouldn’t be the driving factor behind that decision.
Jira Enterprise allows large organizations to create up to 150 separate Jira instances.
Even having separate instances for different divisions is preferable to having a mix of proprietary platforms; it’s much easier for two Jiras to talk to each other than it is for Jira to talk to non-Atlassian software.
For example, you may want to add someone to your instance, a simple task if they’re already an Atlassian user as opposed to if they’re working in Google or Microsoft.
Overall, companies benefit not just from enhanced team efficiency and corporate oversight, but from having uniform security, compliance, scalability, and software support across divisions.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Fig 1

This is why it is also best if all your Jira instances are using, at least broadly, the same add-ons. Because then there will be common work templates and reporting mechanisms, and a comparable flow of work.
You may, for example, want to add a user to your instance so you can present them with data on how a different region or brand is performing. The new user will be able to understand the data much more quickly than if you present them with an unfamiliar report in an unfamiliar tool.

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3. Use the right tools
Getting everyone using the right tools is important – but those tools also need to be the right ones for the job at hand.
You might think that the best course of action is to go for the most advanced tool on the market, but the big spend might not always be the best fix.
The reason these tools might not work is that they are over-engineered and often require much more effort and learning than the average Jira user has time or inclination for. As a result, people start reporting their own way, and incompatible reports and data start to creep back in.
You might also want to seriously consider moving teams away from older tools that don’t integrate with any databases or project management tools. These are often called “siloed” software and the problem is working with programs where you have to export data is that it locks it in at that point, making the report out of date as soon as it’s made.
It can also mean the way people present data on old spreadsheets will differ wildly from person to person and from report to report.
Manual data entry risks errors, it’s timeconsuming, and that means you can make the wrong conclusions and take the wrong actions. Don’t risk it and consider moving your teams into software that integrates with other places you are working in.
Assuming your company uses Jira, choose a complementary suite of Jira add-ons like the Tempo stack. Tempo offers an understanding of  how your time and money is being spent, user workloads and capacity, financial performance, and how you’re tracking towards releases, milestones, and company-wide goals.

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The data you’re producing in Jira, and what to do with it

When you use Jira, you produce data on all the Jira issues you create and work with. This includes data on various default and custom fields, such as status, sprint, assignee, labels, dates, times, components, and other data specific to your company’s work processes.
This allows you to produce reports that look at things like, such as:

  • How sprints, epics, and releases are progressing
  • How workloads are distributed
  • The proportion of the type of work, e.g. features versus bugs
  • How quickly service requests are being resolved, etc.

However, getting to the point where you can work with all that data is a serious task. Managing and analyzing this raw unstructured data can be timeconsuming and resource-intensive, especially without the right tools and expertise.
Now let’s explore the data you’re creating, and how to report on it, when you use Tempo’s add-ons for Jira.

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BI Connectors for Jira
At its core, BI connectors for Jira (also known as Alpha Serve) empowers businesses to make the most of their Jira data. What these connectors do is serve as the bridge between Jira with other systems and platforms, facilitating straightforward data integration.
Ultimately, that means you and your teams gain a more unified view of their business operations. Beyond automated data integration, BI connectors for Jira help you uncover the hidden patterns and trends within your data.
It does this through real-time consolidated reporting and interactive dashboards tailored to your specific analytical requirements.
These streamlined workflows help you navigate complex datasets, meaning more accurate data to work with and robust security measures keeping everything safe.
By integrating your Jira data with BI platforms, these no-code BI Connectors allow unlimited data export across all Jira projects to build complex data models without needing to have tech experts to hand.
Get real-time insights into your project progress, performance, and resources with BI Connectors for Jira.

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Strategic Roadmaps
Roadmunk is a great roadmapping tool for communicating upcoming projects to stakeholders, whilst bringing together different divisions who usually operate independently and letting them see how their work relates to one another, and to the wider goals of the company or company group.
Seeing those dependencies orgwide is a game changer.
It enables you to build roadmaps that tie the work you’re doing in Jira to your product and organizational strategies. You can organize tasks, epics, and initiatives by strategic goal or priority, whatever team, project, or even Jira instance they come from.
You can visualize your Roadmunk roadmaps as swimlanes and timelines, giving senior managers and team members a crystalclear  understandingof the “why” behind the “what”.
The comprehensive visualizations of your backlog, epics, and stories that are only possible when using both Roadmunk and Jira.

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Structure PPM
Once you have objectives and projects defined on a roadmap in Roadmunk, you can use Structure to visualize all your issues in simple spreadsheet-like views based around a theme or initiative. It’s a way of putting all your projects, programs, and portfolios in one place and enables better alignment between different teams. Companies can build custom structures for release management, resource allocation, sprint planning, service management, and more. These structures represent both a new way of seeing and working with existing Jira data, and a new data set in themselves.

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Gantt Charts for Structure
Structure.Gantt by Tempo is a Gantt chart extension that allows users to visualize projects and plans on a single timeline.
This gets teams aligned on deadlines, deliveries,and milestones, and keeps everyone on the same page as to the overall time frame for a project, program, or portfolio.

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Timesheets
The #1 time tracking app for Jira, Timesheets by Tempo adds a new data stream to your system that is essential to many companies’ mode of business: Logged time. This app lets teams log their time on Jira issues for the purposes of charging clients billable hours, tracking capital and operational expenditure (CapEx and OpEx) for tax credits, assessing project health, and understanding team capacity. Timesheets offers multiple options for populating timesheets automatically, approving them, and categorizing billable and non-billable time for seamless customer invoicing.
Timesheets integrates with Structure so that users can roll up their logged and billable time from the sub-task level all the way up to the epic, theme, or initiative-level, depending on your hierarchy.
Then you can answer questions like: “How much non-billable time have we accumulated across the portfolio?” You can also group a structure by Timesheets-specific fields and see the total time for those fields, and do calculations or comparisons of billable time using Structure formulas.

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Capacity Planner
Planner by Tempo is a resource and capacity management tool where you specify the workload and holiday entitlements for your team members and then schedule team members for work based on availability, role, and skills. You can view team capacity, adjust resources, and improve capacity planning using live reports, and make more informed decisions about hiring and resource allocation.
In particular, the Planner and Timesheets integration lets you run a planned versus actual time report, so that you can see how your plans level up to the work actually logged in Timesheets. Running this report regularly reduces wasted resources and billing errors and helps you to evaluate how teams are doing over the lifetime of a project.

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Financial Manager
Tempo Financial Manager offers a high-level overview of project expenses and labor costs, and is particularly useful when integrated with Timesheets. Timesheets feeds Financial Manager time-tracking data so that you can see revenue from billable hours, non-billable hours, CapEx and OpEx, and more.
You can use Financial Manager to visualize total costs and expenses versus your planned budget, and group projects into strategic portfolios to measure financial performance based on aggregated budgets, costs, revenues, and scope.
This app allows teams to accurately measure  the time and cost involved in delivering work,identify patterns and trends for future project forecasting, and avoid making decisions based on incomplete or out-of-date information.

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Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence
The #1 data visualization app on the Atlassian Marketplace, Tempo Custom Charts lets you build fully customizable and engaging reports on your Jira dashboards and Confluence pages.
It is a huge step up from the standard reporting options that come with out-of-the-box Jira.

Ways of visualizing your data from Jira in Custom Charts include:

  • Sprint and release burndowns for agile teams
  • SLA and customer satisfaction visualizations for service management teams
  • Project health and workload reports for business teams

These visual overviews make your Jira data more accessible, and therefore easier to make decisions on.
Custom Charts also integrates with other Tempo apps so that you can make customizable charts out of the additional data they’re giving you.
The Custom Charts and Timesheets integration offers improved visual representation of your time tracking metrics, e.g. you can make color-coded bar charts of time spent per issue type, assignee, component, customer account, and more.
The Custom Charts and Structure PPM integration lets you report on the status and progress of your custom structures, e.g. if you have a structure with multiple teams working towards a shared goal, you can make a multi-sprint burndown to show how they’re doing.burndown to show how they’re doing.

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Portfolio Manager
Portfolio Manager brings advanced predictive scheduling and workplace simulation to create reliable deadlines that your teams (and customers) can trust.
It runs simulations factoring in your team’s capacity, priorities, and ranged estimates to quickly generate expected finish dates – or you can use it to test if your planned deadlines are feasible.
All done automatically, so no manual guessing of dates required. That means you get data to communicate to your teams and your customers or clients of when things can be delivered with 90% accuracy. Portfolio Manager removes the ambiguity of how to set dates to complex projects and portfolios within your organization, instead using data-driven decisions to automatically keep everything on track.

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Examples of data-driven decision making with Tempo

Prioritization of work
How to prioritize work in Jira is a decision that has to be made by project managers and team leaders on a day-to-day basis. In fact, determining the importance and urgency of a task is not just a decision, but a key skill that’s essential for any project management role.
The challenge is in knowing which Jira issues to work on first when you have lots marked as “High” or “Highest” priority.
Another challenge is ordering all the issues marked as “Medium”, as this is often the default priority that team members select when creating Jira issues.
In Jira, you can make prioritization easier by changing or adding priorities when the default ones aren’t quite fit for purpose, e.g. “Critical” for issues that are adversely impacting customers, or “Blocker” for issues that are stopping others from being completed. You can also add flags to highlight issues that are blockers.
However, you’ll still find that you have lots of issues vying for the team’s attention, and it’s up to the project manager to decide on a sensible order for completing them.
This is where data comes in. Tempo’s apps offer new ways of looking at your work in Jira so that you can make better-informed decisions about the prioritization of issues.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 6 Strategic Roadmaps lets you see tasks, projects, and initiatives broken down by strategic goal. This allows project managers to identify which goals are most important, and which tasks and projects should be focused on.
Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 7 Structure PPM allows you to create hierarchical buckets of work relating to a specific product, initiative, or theme. This is helpful because seeing the work broken down like this helps identify the tasks that are most critical to the overarching goal of the structure. You can also use your structures to identify whole bodies of work that should take precedence over others.
Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 8 Custom Charts allows you to aggregate your issues and look at your priorities in different ways:

  • You can break down your issues by priority and see all your highest priority issues in one place. You can then drill into those issues and decide which ones deserve attention first.
  • You can break down your issues by issue type, component, product, customer, cost, flagged issues etc., or create Jira filters based on your preferences (like specific time periods) and report on these. This can help you decide which of your highpriority issues to focus on. For example, if a  high-priority issue comeswith a heavy cost, you might want to focus on a high priority issue with a lower cost.
  • A chart that displays your priorities can also highlight if you have team members prioritizing incorrectly, e.g. team members categorizing “low” priority tasks as “medium”. This can initiate discussions about prioritization improvements.
  • You could add a custom field to track whether issues are or are not on budget. You could then build a RAG (red, amber, and green) chart in Custom Charts to highlight issues that are on or over budget. This can help a team to decide when to stop working on something, and prioritize something else.
  • You can use the Custom Charts and Timesheets integration to see how much time you’re spending on each customer account. This enables you to weigh up customers in terms of their profitability, and do the high-priority work for the most profitable customers first.

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Resource allocation
Deciding where to allocate your resources is vitally important when you’re planning projects. You’ll also need to re-allocate when there are scope changes, new deadlines, unexpected absences, etc. Prioritization can happen without looking at reports and charts – reports just make prioritization easier, faster, and smarter.
However, resource allocation is a decision that cannot happen without data.
Tempo’s apps present you with the data you need to thrive as an agile enterprise and the make resource allocation decisions required to keep your teams working smoothly.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 9 Capacity Planner will be your most important tool here. By specifying the workload and holiday entitlements for your team, you can assign them to projects based on their availability and suitability.
You can view team capacity in live reports and make decisions about re-allocation or hiring new people if certain projects need extra personnel. Equally, Capacity Planner will show you team members who have time available for more work.
The planned versus actual time report that comes with the Capacity Planner/ Timesheets integration can also help improve your resource allocation decisions by showing you if your plans and logged time match up. If logged time exceeds planned time, for  example, it could mean that the project manager didn’t assign enough people to do the work.
Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 10 Custom Charts lets you see assignee workloads and identify whether work has been allocated evenly, or if some people are handling too many issues. You could also take advantage of the Custom Charts and Timesheets integration and look at how much time people are spending on their work, another indicator of whether someone needs help.
Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Symbol 11. Financial Manager, by allowing you to measure the time and cost of delivering work, helps project managers forecast the resources required for future projects.

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions - Fig 21

Conclusion
Jira offers a wealth of data, but it can be difficult to know what to do with it all – let alone make decisions on it – without the right tools at your disposal.
This isn’t to say that having access to a lot of data isn’t a major win – it certainly is – but is annoyingly not the end point of the process. To be a successful agile organization (and team), sometimes you need more specific data and sometimes you need assistance with accurately applying that data to your future work.
Jira does have some built-in reporting options that you can evaluate the progress and performance of your projects and team members. These are useful, but you often can’t see exactly what you want or need. So remember that data is more than just data.
You need to be aware of the challenges (and risks) that come from applying it incorrectly, try to unify the systems your teams are working on to get uniform data, and make reporting a habit.
Finally, you need extra tools and add-ons to help you understand or get more insights from your data. Superior organization and visualization capabilities help you make decisions about prioritization, estimation, resource allocation, process improvements, and more. Having integrations between your tools helps you combine and hone those insights and make smarter decisions, faster.
Helping with the above challenges is exactly what Tempo’s toolkit is designed to do. A modular and flexible set of tools that can work to help with a specific need, or can be combined together to create a powerful system for you and your teams to make impactful and data-driven decisions.
If you want to do more with Jira, just get in touch with Tempo or check out more from our solutions over on our website at Tempo.io
Also, if you are looking for more solutions and top tips on agile practices, we’ve built a full resource base filled with best practices, e-books, and guide on using our tools to help: Agile at Scale

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Documents / Resources

Tempo Jira Data Driven Decisions [pdf] Instructions
Jira Data Driven Decisions, Jira Data Driven Decisions, Data Driven Decisions, Driven Decisions, Decisions

References

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