Project communications in Jira can be a challenge. Imagine if it's already a struggle to be on the same page with the most recent developments. Here's when project notifications come into the game, an important ingredient of your communication processes. Keep reading to learn how to leverage project subscriptions and project watchers in Jira.
Project communication processes ensure that each stakeholder of interest is informed about meeting decisions, daily scrums, project changes, and more. They also transmit, document, and archive all information about the project. In order to achieve any common goal, project communication is key at two levels: internal exchange and information management.
Project communication is tough even for the best leaders! Across tools, contexts, industries, and cultures, it’s often recognized as one of the toughest barriers to effective collaboration.
Balancing how much information to share is hard: when there’s too much, it becomes cumbersome and difficult to digest, but when there’s too little, it’s extremely easy to miss important connections that eventually break down the process and generate delays, frustration, and poor business results. It’s not the only dilemma: When communication is formalized, it becomes bureaucratic and fails to capture exceptions. But when it’s informal, it’s even more unreliable.
Jira has skipped this problem by focusing on tactical collaboration and ignoring project management…, but this is virtually an information war for many of you.
As it stands, Jira is both brilliant and catastrophic at project communication.
With a couple of simple tricks, it’s easy to transform project communication from catastrophic to stellar and make your mom, boss, and colleagues proud of the achievement.
Let’s see how to cure project communication in Jira with Projectrak notifications, which are absolutely game-changing for project stakeholders!
We’re now very happy to announce the release of project subscriptions for Projectrak Data Center!
Project subscriptions are scheduled reports you can receive directly into your inbox. In the reports, you’ll get a table with one project for each row and all the information you have previously selected in the columns.
This is fine for a current picture –but it’s static. If you want to have a more dynamic idea of what’s changed, you can choose to highlight the values that have changed since the last report.
Throughout the article I’ll explain why subscriptions are filling an important communication gap.
Projectrak has long solved Jira's lack of project information and expanded tracking capabilities from issues to projects. It’s very normal for this app to extend features in Jira, although sometimes we make them a bit prettier 😊
It’s only natural that Projectrak notifications are inspired by Jira notifications. However, moving away from the issue of project data has important implications.
The main differences are:
Learn how to track project budgets in Jira >>
In this case, supervision and decision-making processes can be supported with a comprehensive summary report with the most metrics as they stand at a particular point in time.
With this in mind, let’s see how subscriptions and watchers solve different communication scenarios. We’ll have a look at two different options for project notifications:
Of course, this is only a rough rule of thumb, but usually, those watching a project take a direct part in it and need to be notified as soon as a change happens so they can align their work with the new situation.
If you supervise multiple projects in Jira, subscriptions to queries in the Project Navigator will give you a complete and easy-to-read digest.
Here is a basic example that a Business Controller may want to create: Budgeted projects with the total spent until now and the number of open stories. Remember, subscribing to a query in the project navigator has different levels.
Another advantage of subscriptions is the ability to schedule them at any intervals. This is great when it comes to creating mandated reporting policies that are semi-automated, like Atlassian’s project central: for example, every project owner should update project information and make a quick status write-up on Fridays before 5 pm so the subscription captures it.
Or if you have weekly follow-up project meetings, you can schedule a weekly subscription to be sent out every Thursday evening. Thus, you will have a table with the most current information in your inbox, ready to be discussed with your team without even going into Jira.