When it comes to enhancing productivity, few tools are as powerful as Jira. It’s the go-to suite for managing software projects, and the cool thing about it is that you can extend the power of Jira through additional apps.
One of these apps is Multiple Checklists For Jira. It’s simple in principle – it allows you to add checklists to your tasks, as a substitute for sub-tasks or an additional way to track progress and provide task guidelines.
Anyone who’s interested in productivity will know that a checklist is one of the best tools for streamlining work processes, and enabling yourself and your team to do more in a shorter amount of time.
Here’s how Multiple Checklists For Jira can be used to make your team’s work easier.
Maintain a healthy workflow and spend less time talking
Creative work, like programming, is never easy. What makes it even harder are never ending interruptions.
Experts say that it takes about 15 minutes to refocus on what you were doing after being interrupted. The interruption can be as small as a Slack message about whether something is done.
If one Slack message can cost a developer 15 minutes, think about how much time gets wasted when there’s too much back & forth communication in your team.
With Multiple Checklists for Jira, you can vastly reduce the amount of interrupting messages that disrupt your team’s work.
Customizable item statuses (“done”, “in progress”, “blocked”, “waiting for approval”, etc) immediately show what’s going on with an item on the checklist. If an item is “blocked”, you can address it at the next meeting. If something is “done” or “in progress”, you don’t need to message the person responsible and disrupt their workflow only to ask about the status.
Another cool feature is history. By hovering over a checklist item, you can see when it was checked off, and by whom. No need to write @team messages to ask who finished that item. All the information you need is easily accessible.
Eliminate guesswork and avoid miscommunication
Long and cryptic task descriptions are not the ideal way to present information about a task. In the perfect situation, you want to provide just enough guidelines for someone to know exactly what they need to do.
Any excess information contributes to miscommunication, and if there’s not enough information – your teammates will help to spend their time guessing what you meant.
Checklists are a good way to remove both miscommunication and guesswork from your team’s workflow.
For example, think about Definition of Done.
A checklist is the easiest way to make sure that a task meets all the requirements in the Definition of Done.
One awesome feature of Multiple Checklists that comes in handy here is that you can make multiple Definition of Done checklist templates, and automatically assign them to specific types of issues.
You can make different DoD templates for issues like adding new features, making bug fixes, doing code review, refactoring code, and so on. Then, in the “Manage Templates” section of Multiple Checklists For Jira, you can assign these templates to the appropriate type of issues – and voila! All new issues of a given type will have your DoD template by default.
Streamline your process
Checklists are a powerful tool for optimizing your work process in a way that you always do only what’s necessary, without spending time on irrelevant work, or having to ask other people what to do.
Optimizing processes with checklists takes time and consistency, but it pays off immensely. In Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto”, the author describes multiple high-risk jobs where checklists ensure that people don’t forget crucial steps and avoid potentially life-threatening mistakes. Surgeons, or airplane pilots, use checklists all the time.
The difficulty is that it may be hard to convince your team to be consistent with their checklists, and put in the effort to think about how they could be better.
Working on checklists is not just the manager’s role, it’s the role of the whole team. This goes deep into your organizational culture.
How do you make checklists work, and reap the benefits from streamlining your workflow with them? Every team member needs to understand how important checklists are – not just to their work, but to how the whole team operates.
Even more importantly, you need to have a culture of feedback. It will be hard to optimize your checklists if you, as a manager, are the only one who cares about what’s in them.
Encourage your team to discuss checklists, and suggest improvements. Over time, you and your team will arrive at the perfect versions of checklists that will make your daily tasks much easier.
Try Multiple Checklists For Jira and see how it helps your team
A lot of the features in Multiple Checklists are customizable, in the spirit of Jira, so how you use it may be different from the above examples.
All in all, introducing checklists might be just what your teammates need to get to the next level of productivity. Try it out!
Go to the Multiple Checklists for Jira website, or go to “Apps -> Find new apps” in Jira, and search for “Checklists” – Multiple Checklists should be the first app that pops up.