Why all your people should use the same Jira reporting tool

Let’s say you have most of the people in your company using Jira for work management. Dev and IT teams, business teams, and senior management alike. Great! You’re most of the way there in your mission to break down information silos and get everyone working cohesively.

But have you achieved a single source of truth? Not if you don’t have standardized reporting.

Why is standardized Jira reporting important?

Achieving a single source of truth is about ensuring that everyone in an organization is making decisions on the same data.

This can’t happen if everyone’s using different reporting tools. It means they’re making reports that differ in structure, design, format, units of measurement, level of detail, and how up-to-date the information is. This creates a whole slew of problems:

• Time spent reporting varies wildly from tool to tool, leading to irregularity and inconsistency in your reporting patterns

• One team’s report can’t be repeated by another because it was made in a different tool

• Reports become hard or impossible to compare with each other

• There’s a lack of integrity in the organization’s reporting, because each chart is showing the same data differently

• People come to different conclusions from the same data, or miss the most crucial message of the report

• People start to mistrust reports because they don’t know which ones contain the most up-to-date data

• Communications slow down and potentially even stop

Reports are necessary for monitoring progress and performance and improving how an organization operates. But to make the strategic difference they’re supposed to, those reports need to be presented and utilized consistently. Getting all your teams to use one tool, thereby standardizing your approach to reporting as well as the structure and design of your charts, will help fuel much more meaningful discussions about strategy.

You also want everyone to be using a tool that’s fully integrated with your team’s data. If you have people using siloed reporting tools like Excel, you’re exporting and duplicating your data and manually formatting your reports. This always carries the risk of manual error not to mention being stupidly time-consuming. It also means that your reports are immediately out of date as soon as they’re made.

So, if your teams are using Jira, you want everyone to be reporting in Jira with live data using the same Jira reporting tool.

Here’s why that tool should be Custom Charts for Jira.

Why Custom Charts should become your standard reporting tool

Out-of-the-box Jira reports just aren’t good enough for telling data stories. Certainly not the data stories we need to tell to drive change. The data and visualization options are just too limited.

Custom Charts for Jira is easy for everyone to use, regardless of what team you’re on. It’s a highly flexible Jira reporting and data visualization add-on that’s as useful to marketers and HR managers as it is to developers and IT technicians. In a few clicks you can make colorful and engaging agile reports (such as sprint and release burndowns), IT service management reports (such as SLA and customer satisfaction charts), and business reports (such as project health and time tracking charts).

So, if your company has multiple Jira instances, installing Custom Charts on all of them will standardize and optimize your reporting process.

Here are some of the specific benefits of all your reports being Custom Charts reports:

• All your reports will share the same structure, design, and level of detail and no one will be second-guessing what the charts are telling them.

• With Custom Charts on all your instances, teams can share ideas on what reports to make, and help newbies from different teams understand what the charts are showing.

• If you see another team’s Custom Chart and you think it would be useful, you can copy the configuration and paste it onto your own Jira dashboard.

• The ability to copy/paste configurations and use chart templates also make setting up Custom Charts on a new instance super-quick.

• Having Custom Charts across instances is a good way of highlighting potential data errors and Jira misuse if another team’s report isn’t working for you.

• You’ll end up with more people getting more out of Jira, not wasting time and money on unnecessary extra tools.

• If you have teams using Confluence, but not Jira, you can install the mirror image Confluence version of Custom Charts on all your Confluence instances as well. This allows teams working in Confluence to see progress made on Jira projects without leaving Confluence.