Which teams in your organization could benefit from Jira and why?

As companies move into the future of work, the fast pace created by technology can often be overwhelming. Professionals today struggle to keep up with the rapidly changing and agile times. Reports of burnout and overwork are now becoming the norm rather than the exception. With all these changes, managers and decision-makers are looking for tools to help teams remain productive without becoming busy and overwhelmed.

Productivity tools have risen in the last few years, with people turning to technology, software, and artificial intelligence to make work more efficient. As managers and companies brainstorm on ways to remain optimal, there’s been one common request: more documentation and tracking.

Time tracking data reveals that the United States loses 50 million hours per day because of unrecorded work activities.

One of the most popular tools is Jira, a project management, tracking, and productivity product that has risen in popularity over the last few years.

What is Jira?

Jira is a product developed by Atlassian back in 2002. The name comes from a nickname of the famed Japanese monster “Godzilla”. Jira started purely as an issue tracking software targeting software developers, and quickly evolved into one of today’s biggest productivity tools.

The benefits of Jira are endless. These are four core areas of Jira that bring immediate advantages:

• Jira Core

  is for generic project management.

• Jira Software

  helps with management, specifically for Agile project management set-ups.

• Jira Service Management

  helps with IT operations or business service desks.

• Opsgenie

  is great for incident management.

Who can benefit from Jira?

The big question for companies now is why use Jira for my team and who can benefit directly from it? Here are some of the specific work team applications that can help various teams and departments in an organization.

Managers

Studies show that 80% of the average workday is spent on activities with little to no value. As employees struggle to stay efficient, managers can step in and provide the necessary guidance to get back to our productive ways.

Jira provides task management and project roadmap features that help teams stay on top of deliverables and tasks. Through these features, managers can make sure that teams move the needle. Time tracking software also helps managers observe the working schedules and output of staff. More importantly, management teams and project heads can make necessary adjustments and plans to create progress in the long run across their respective.

Product launch teams

New products and features help ensure the future of companies by giving people something to look forward to and encouraging them to stay loyal to a product or brand. As companies come up with new products and features, project managers must stay on top of every detail.

More often than warranted, unwanted scenarios can arise during the product development process. With a Jira project management tool, teams can create multiple versions of a roadmap, which will help account for contingencies and roadblocks. This feature helps product launch teams stay ready for both the best and worst-case scenarios.

Development and maintenance departments

Jira’s original design was to help with bug monitoring and maintenance. So it makes sense that the best job for Jira is to help tech and maintenance departments. Today, there is an increasing number of tech teams that use Jira Software as a central hub for coding, collaboration, and release stages. It’s also a great way to test builds and roll-outs before actual launches to ensure that products run well before hitting the market.

Because Jira also has issue tracking that works side-by-side with time trackers, teams also get a good grasp of which issues take up the most time. In this way they get a sense of which issues will take longer to fix in the future if something similar comes up again. Estimation and work logging add another layer of expectation management when performing maintenance and fixes.

HR departments

A time tracking tool within Jira doesn’t only help employees. It helps human resource managers and staff too.

In an interview with employees, 93% of them reported that salaries arrived on time because time tracking tools made the salary processing smoother and faster.

On top of helping with payroll processes, Jira and Tempo Timesheets can also be integrated with an HR dashboard to track absence management and see the context of employee absences and leave and time-off requests that HR staff pre-approved.

Sales teams

Jira can also be of great use for sales teams. With a time tracker, sales agents can report the number of hours they spend per lead and help sales managers get a better glimpse of how much time and effort their staff put into product demos, sales calls, and other sales activities.

With a time tracking or project management software, sales teams can also set weekly or monthly goals and track their progress. This also gives them the ability to review previous performance and make necessary adjustments by switching to products that perform well and tag those that don’t.

Time tracking vs micromanaging

For the longest time, the debate around time tracking and project management has been around micromanagement. But there’s a big difference between time tracking versus micromanaging and spying on employees.

The big difference between both lies in the intent of management. First, we need to answer the question, “Why do I want to track my team’s performance?”

More often than not, managers deploy time tracking and project management tools to help teams remain productive, which is always for the benefit of both employer and employee. As more companies opt for work from home set-ups, time tracking tools give employees the liberty to work from anywhere without sacrificing trust and results. Done right, time tracking in Jira gives company personnel more freedom, not less.

Managers can also use advanced reporting and data analytics tools to check time periods spent per issue, make better decisions and speed up processes by making necessary adjustments to workflows. With a Jira time-tracker attached to a service like Tempo Timesheets, users can integrate calendars like Google Calendar or Outlook 365 to schedule events and meetings.

Of course, there are many other available options for time tracking outside of Jira. Check out this list of other softwares to select and compare time tracking software platforms.

The many benefits of time tracking

In the grand scheme of business productivity, time tracking does astronomically more good than harm. It can remove distractions, helps fast-track results, and saves everyone time and effort in many ways. Hence it makes sense that companies start using software like Jira and Tempo Timesheets to keep teams productive.

As technology improves and the world moves towards globalization, the pace of business will continue to go faster. Using productivity tools will help companies stay on top of their game and remain competitive in this digital age of software and automation.

Learn more about Timesheets.