Jira is a popular project management tool. It helps teams manage tasks and work together. This article looks at common issues users face with Epics, and provides practical solutions for a smoother project management experience.
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Understanding Jira
Jira is a professional project management and issue-tracking platform designed to enhance collaboration and efficiency within teams. Developed by Atlassian, Jira is widely utilized in various industries, with its primary focus on software development projects, but it's suitable for teams of various types and sizes.
One of Jira's strengths lies in its flexibility. Users can customize workflows, fields, and screens to align with their specific project requirements. This adaptability allows teams to tailor Jira to their unique processes.
Teams can work together effectively within Jira. They can create dashboards and generate reports, offering insights into project progress, team performance, and overall productivity. This data helps managers make informed decisions and improve productivity.
What are Jira Issues?
Jira work items, formerly called issues, are the basic units of any project. They represent individual tasks, stories, epics, or bugs that collectively contribute to project progression. Understanding Jira issues is important for effective project management, providing a foundation for Epic creation and tracking.
There are a couple of Jira work items that can represent various types of work, such as:
- User Stories: Descriptions of desired functionality or features from an end-user perspective, often used in Agile development methodologies. Teams use them to focus on customer value.
- Tasks: Standard units of work for goals that do not fit other categories. These are useful for general items. Examples include administrative work, internal research, or maintenance.
- Epics: Larger bodies of work that can be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks or stories. An Epic usually takes a long time to complete and spans across several sprints.
- Bugs: Issues that highlight problems or errors in the software that need to be addressed and fixed. Reporting these items helps developers find and resolve defects. This helps the team maintain software quality and performance.
- Sub-tasks: Granular steps required to complete a story, task, or bug. These are the smallest units in the hierarchy. They help break down complex work into simple and manageable actions.
Jira work items follow a hierarchy. Epics sit at the top, while sub-tasks are at the bottom. A parent item sits above another item. For example, a task is a parent to its sub-tasks. You can also link items to show dependencies. Common links include "blocks," "duplicates," or "relates to." This helps teams see connected work.
Every work item captures specific data in fields. These include the assignee, due date, and status. You can create custom fields to collect unique information. Choosing the right fields helps teams move work forward faster.
What are epics in Jira?
Epics in Jira are containers for large bodies of work. You can break them down into smaller tasks and stories. They offer a high-level view of a project, helping with better organization and planning. Epics categorize and prioritize work to provide a roadmap for the team to follow. They are integral to maintaining a clear and organized project structure.
Epics play a central role in project management. Grouping related tasks, teams can streamline their workflow, enhance collaboration, and achieve a clear view of project progress. Using epics helps keep projects on track so teams can deliver results on time and within scope.
Creating Epics in Jira
Users can quickly create epics within the project. To create an epic, follow these steps:
Step 1: Navigate to Your Project
Begin by accessing your project within Jira.
Step 2: Choose "Create" and Select "Epic"
There are three main ways to create a new epic.
You can hit the "Create" button located in the global navigation bar at the top of the screen. Then select Epic for the work item type.
You can also click the "Plus" sign in the Epic Panel within your backlog.
Another efficient method is to create an epic directly on the Timeline for immediate visual planning.
Step 3: Fill in Epic Details
A well-crafted epic requires special details. Provide a short Epic Name to act as a label for child issues. You also need an Epic Summary for the full title. Setting start and due dates is also helpful for long-term planning.
Step 4: Add Issues to Your Epic
An epic gains its significance from the issues it holds. Add child issues like relevant tasks, stories, or bugs to your epic, establishing a clear hierarchy within your project.
Create Epics and Track Their Progress
Monitoring progress helps you stay informed. Jira provides tracking features like progress bars and Epic Burndown charts. You can also use Epic Swimlanes to group tasks on your board for better visibility.
Sometimes users cannot get a full picture of who is doing what and when it’s going to be done, especially with multiple teams. In these cases, managers often need a clear view of overall project progress and resource use.
Jira offers a wide variety of add-ons that can upgrade your visualization and planning capabilities and help with tracking and managing Jira epics more effectively.
For example, ActivityTimeline for Jira is a resource planning and issue management Jira plugin that can facilitate your long-term planning, resource management, and epic tracking.
Manage Issues and Teams in ActivityTimeline
The app offers a Planning Dashboard that shows projects, issues, and teams in a single view. Users can see work across multiple projects easily. The tool works like a calendar with individual and team timelines. This setup helps you plan different scopes and schedule tasks directly on timelines with a simple drag-and-drop feature.
Or create new issues directly from the dashboard. Everything is synchronized with Jira automatically.
The dashboard shows teams and users with their actual workload. This makes it easy to understand who is working on specific tasks and when they will finish. Workload indicators help you spot overloads or underloads. Green shows optimal work. Red indicates an overload, and yellow means underload. These indicators help you balance work across your Epics. Holiday Schemes manage public holidays and vacations across different regions. The tool automatically adjusts timelines when staff are away. This keeps your Epic deadlines realistic.
A special Left Panel with projects and issues can be customized to your needs with the help of the Quick Filters and Groupings, which is very comfortable when you need to find specific issues or sort out all your epics:
ActivityTimeline provides time tracking features, so you can easily log work on different kinds of issues, including epics.
Users can log time spent in Workspace in multiple different ways:
Users can add work descriptions and mark worked hours as billable or non-billable. This data supports detailed reporting. For complex work, you can use the Split Issue feature to divide a single task among several people. If plans change, the Bulk Rescheduling tool allows you to move groups of tasks at once. This data can be used in advanced Timesheets, which can also be created with the help of ActivityTimeline (epic timesheets included).
Epics Panel in ActivityTimeline
ActivityTimeline provides a special feature - Team Panel, that also works as an Epic Panel. This panel provides a team view for assigning tasks to a whole group instead of one person. It is useful for managing multiple teams and long-term planning. ActivityTimeline allows you to organize users into different team types to plan your work. Functional teams group people by their skills or job titles. This allows you to see all your specialists, like QA engineers or developers, in one place. It helps you confirm if you have the right experts available to complete a specific Epic.
Here you may find the team view with epics. The team timeline shows the workload and assigned epics.
Another feature is that you can quickly see child issues (sub-items) and epic progress from the special epic window.
Moreover, you can assign existing child issues directly to individuals with a simple drag-and-drop move!
Users can also create more child issues directly from this window. For high-level strategy, the Portfolio View helps you see capacity at the epic level. This guarantees that you have enough resources for large initiatives.
Track Epics with Timesheets
ActivityTimeline provides a dedicated Timesheet Module that allows you to create diverse, detailed timesheets:
You can generate Epic Timesheets with a few clicks to see how much time the team spends on large objectives:
You can sort these reports by user to understand who worked on which epic. Or you can group data by issues to see worklogs for child tasks. Then you can get Detailed epic timesheets that show users, time spent, and categories.
You can save your favorite timesheet configurations and export them as Excel files.
IMCD Group is a leading chemical distribution company with an IT department that manages a complex network of technologies across the entire enterprise. As the department grew quickly, they lacked a standardized way to track timesheets across different teams. They could not see exactly how much time was spent on specific projects or tickets.
James Gibbons, the Group Integration Manager, needed better visibility to improve operational efficiency. The team chose ActivityTimeline because it provides extensive time tracking and integrates closely with Jira. Implementation helped the department move from inconsistent tracking to a structured system.
The results were immediate. The time required to sign off an invoice dropped from 5 minutes to just 1 minute. This made the process five times faster and saved each manager over 5 hours every month. Senior management now uses the tool for a high-level overview of time allocation. This data helps them make informed decisions about project funding and how to distribute resources across various initiatives.
Conclusion
Jira Epics help project managers and teams manage complex projects. Jira offers many tools for successful project management and issue tracking, as well as various add-ons, like ActivityTimeline that can improve your planning activities and visualization.
By following the outlined steps and best practices, you'll create structured epics and ensure a smoother project management experience and epic tracking along with efficient team management.
