When it comes to project management, the devil is in the details – especially when tasks are multiplied. Sure, it’s not that hard to create an issue just once. How about when you need to create a similar issue constantly? 80 similar issues to be more precise. What happens when those reports are also needed at different frequencies?
This was exactly the situation that one of our clients in the financial sector faced. They had made a commitment to a regulator to deliver improvements and more transparency surrounding their current governance and framework. To do this, they weren’t going to post 80 different sticky notes on their desk as a reminder. Rather, they used Jira Software and two Marketplace apps: The Scheduler to automatically create issues at the defined intervals and Automation for Jira to alert the team the issue has been created so they can start their work.
Scheduling Jira issues
The Scheduler is an amazing app that provides automatic issue creation, saving users from manually and continuously creating Jira issues. For our client, The Scheduler was identified as a good tool that could be used for the generation of issues in Jira, as each issue would then represent one of the regulator reports. The fields used in the screens for these issues contained all the key data the organization would need to keep an audit trail of the parties involved for each report.
Here’s how we configured the app in just a few minutes.
Creating Scheduled Issues
First, you will need to create a draft version of the issue which will then be reproduced by the tool. The scheduling form is divided into the following 3 sections:
- Basic Info: This is where the scheduled issue name and description will be set for the project.
- Issue Details: The issue’s field values can be set at this stage.
- Set Trigger Details: There are 3 different trigger types, which are Cron, Interval and Manual. Cron will allow you to use a string of 6 or 7 advanced expressions which will contain details of the schedule (as shown below).
The Interval functionality allows an issue to be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. The Manual trigger type does not schedule issues; rather it creates the template and allows the user to use an “Execute” button.
Managing scheduled issues
All scheduled issues for your Jira project will be shown in the Scheduled Issues table. In this view you will be able to; Edit Scheduled Issues, Delete Scheduled Issues, Manage Access, List Upcoming Issues, Clone Scheduled Issues and more.
Automating issue and workflow notifications
After each issue was created at the corresponding time it was needed, the team needed to automate notifications for the issues, track the issues that were overdue and maintain an audit trail of all parties involved in each issues workflow. The Automation For Jira app was used to send an email notification to the team that had been assigned the scheduled issue. A member of that team would then go into the Jira issue and self assign themselves to the issues. As not all the information was generic in the issues, the user would insert key details such as: Names of people to be involved in the report’s processing, Report Name, Due Dates, etc.
Automation for Jira was also used to notify the admin user when an issue had been escalated at certain parts of the workflow. More on automation rules in Jira Software can be expanded upon in one of our previous blogs.
You’re at your most productive when you are fully engaged on the task at hand – not when you are trying to swim your way out of sticky note reminders or catching up on tasks which were forgotten and now overdue. Some small automated configurations can save you and your team a lot of time down the road.
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