Jira tools (Jira Service Management (JSM) & Jira)

Organizing your teams and their work within the Jira Suite of tools.

It can be difficult to figure out how to get started in this environment, so do not feel overwhelmed, LTS is here to help.

Things to think about when figuring out how to apply these tools to your organizations.

Who is defining the work to be done?

Who?

Tool(s)

Why?

Who?

Tool(s)

Why?

Lehigh staff

Jira, Trello

All three tools can support managing work defined by staff with licenses for these tools working within the tools.

Students, faculty, external entities that are not working in the tools

JSM

JSM allows tickets to be submitted and collaboration on those tickets without the reporter needing a license for the product. Technically, all of the tools support submitting tasks by sending an email to a specified address, but if the submitter wants to continue collaborating on the task once submitted, JSM works best.

What type of work is being done?

What?

Tool(s)

Why?

What?

Tool(s)

Why?

Management of a variety of projects to include software, product, business, teams.

Jira

Jira has more tools that support agile development such as sprints, burn down charts, and other capabilities that might be overkill for most teams.

All other work

Jira or Trello

Jira and Trello have features most appropriate for work that falls outside of actual development. Both offer calendar views not available in JS, and JSM offers a timeline view for visualizing tasks in a Gantt chart-like view.

NOTE: Jira is the only tool that currently supports visualizing work across JSM and Jira, so you need to have at least one person with a Jira license who is able to build visualizations that will allow the rest of your teams to see work across those tools if using multiple tools. Most important for teams that use JSM for tracking tickets and Jira for project work.

What is the scope of the work?

Scope?

Tool(s)

Why?

Scope?

Tool(s)

Why?

Single organizational team

Single project or board in Jira or Trello

Multiple projects can be tracked within a single environment if only one team is working on it.

Cross team within a single stem

Separate projects or boards within a certain category or Workspace within Trello or Jira tools (Jira and JSM)

We can use categories in the Jira projects and Workspaces in Trello to tie together multiple projects or boards that fall within specific stems. Projects can only have one category, and boards can only reside in one workspace.

Cross department

Separate projects within JSM and Jira that can be tied together using either Overviews, Dashboards, or Jira Advanced Planning.

The Jira tools provide advanced sharing, linking, and visualizations to better support cross-department work. Trello no longer works well in this environment.

For immediate help, contact the LTS Help Desk (Hours)
EWFM Library | Call: 610-758-4357 (8-HELP) | Text: 610-616-5910 | Chat | helpdesk@lehigh.edu
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