Jira: Our new agile project management system

At ImagePlus – as at every other company during the present pandemic – we’ve been doing a lot more remote working. We’ve also tried to keep connected with each other and our offices, whilst maintaining full compliance with all guidelines. But of course, remote working has become an integral part of how we do business right now.

As you’d imagine, we’ve looked to apps to help us stay connected and productive throughout. The good news for all businesses is that there is a slew of apps and tools out there to help teams make the most of remote working – the difficulty isn’t finding them, but separating the wheat from the chaff.

We think we’ve found one of the diamonds in all this rough. Jira is software from Atlassian that helps teams be more organized and interact better with each other at all times – but especially right now. Originally a bug tracker, it has now evolved to an all-singing, all-dancing project management tool.

Specifically designed for developers, it helps teams code and create in collaboration with each other, managing development and testing phasing and integrating workflows easily and visually. It’s entirely customisable, too, so it shapes itself around a business’s particular needs.

It’s become a major tool for us, helping us manage our teams and even create new development standards and strategies. In other words, it’s powered not just productivity for us – but also improvements.

For example, Jira helps guide us every time through a dedicated development path with every issue and feature we encounter being carefully staged and clearly documented. This is the sort of good practice we carried out before we’d ever heard of Jira, of course – but the intuitive element of this software makes everything so much smoother. From the moment we write our spec, all the way to testing and finally deployment, Jira has our back. 

Not only that, but Jira integrates with every other element of our process, too. By linking with our coding platforms and versioning repositories, Jira also allows our developers to write code together – and control what is ready to be released, and what still needs work. This means we can create and release versions directly from Jira and with much better documentation of that particular block of code.

With Jira, everyone is assigned a specific role in every project. Obviously, this isn’t new to us – but what Jira offers is instant visualisation of who is doing what and easy adjustment of tasks. When working remotely, this sort of instant recall is critical and immeasurably enhances our efficiency. 

The opposite also applies, of course: if the developer needs any additional documentation or designs, he or she can request directly from the tool – which allows for a much bigger communication between co-workers. Jira enables the two-way process between individual and team which really powers performance.

In other words, an app like Jira is extremely helpful when it comes to collaborating, prioritising, reporting and delegating – and for every project, documenting these common functions is key to success. Teams that once relied on being in the same office to achieve this sort of supervision of each other must now rely on tech – and Jira delivers. Not only do we know where each of us is at any given moment – Jira offers our customers, too, total traceability for their project.

And ultimately, that’s what matters: better serving the client. In this era of remote working, we’ve been at pains to ensure we maintain service levels. It’s apps like Jira that help us – and will help you, too – do just that.