Using Next-gen Projects In Jira
Jira recently came out with something called next-gen projects. These are agile software projects with a few new features that should improve the workflow of your team.
Less time is spent doing admin so more time can be spent on work.
New Features
Simplified Configuration
A next-gen project gives you a much more simple setup than a classic project. Permissions are as simple as choosing if a project can be accessed by the team or by everyone on your Jira site. Projects can now be configured individually too without impacting other projects. This means there's a lot less risk of breaking a global configuration and team members have the ability to manage their own project without getting a Jira admin involved.
Story Points
Time estimates have been removed in the next-gen project. Everything is now based around story points. Story points rate the relative effort of work in a Fibonacci-like format: 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100. You can make your own points system up but I find this one works well because it pushes the team to make tougher decisions around the difficulty of work. The reason for using story points is because date estimates don’t account for non-project related work that creeps in like emails and meetings. No individual task should be more than 20 points. If it is, then it definitely needs breaking down into smaller chunks.
Epic Roadmap
Epics existed before next-gen projects but now we have an easy way to visualise them. Epics are high-level milestones, themes or categories that make it easy to plan and track where you are. They can be broken down into child issues and assigned to individual team members. The new roadmap functionality allows you to visualise the epics showing a clear timeline and workload estimate. This is also a great tool for communicating with management.
Sprints
Sprints will be a new way of working for me. On a Monday, we'll look at all the tickets in the backlog and pick out the ones we want to complete that week, leaving a little room for urgent tickets and roadblocks. Those tickets go into a week-long sprint. At the end of the week, we "complete" the sprint and see if we finished all the work we'd planned to do. If anything is left over, it gets moved to next week's sprint and we start the planning process again. This new way of working keeps us on track and stops us from getting overwhelmed by new tickets.
The image above shows the backlog of tickets with this week's sprint above it. Items from the backlog can be dragged into the sprint at any time.
This image shows all the tickets in the current sprint. If planned correctly, all these tickets should be completed by the end of the week.
Pages
Jira Confluence is now integrated nicely into next-gen projects. A new Pages tab has been added to the side where we can easily see all the articles in our domain. These are a mix of blog posts, tutorials, and meeting notes. Having access to all of those in a single area makes it easier to manage workflow and document everything for future use.
Conclusion
Using a next-gen project gives us slightly less customisation with the added bonus of a simplified workflow. Roadmaps give management a clear view of where we want to get to and how long it will take. Integrating Pages let's us document issues, solutions and ideas a lot easier. Less time is spent doing admin so more time can be spent on work.