For an excellent manager to successfully lead their team to the desired outcome, they need access to sufficient relevant and accurate data and information.

One of the most effective tools and aids is regular reports. These enable ongoing monitoring, timely interventions, and potential adjustments leading to successful goal achievement. Since each project is often different and has its specifics, finding a universal reporting key is more of a dream. If you use Atlassian Jira as your tool for work or as a manager, you have several reporting options available.

Proper configuration of attributes

Collecting necessary data and its subsequent evaluation are fundamental pillars of successful management, whether of a company, department, or one or more projects. Only based on truthful, accurate, and timely information can managerial decisions be correct, which is why objective reporting is essential. Making the right moves is difficult if a manager has incomplete, inaccurate, or no information.

With its wide range of capabilities and high adaptability, Jira is an excellent reporting tool, regardless of its version. It always manages to adapt to your needs. Properly defining fields (attributes) is essential.

Reporting must not obstruct

However, if you need a different type of attribute that isn’t available in the basic setup, you can easily download it from the Atlassian Marketplace. If your requirements and needs are so specific that you can’t find the right one even there, it’s not difficult to customise a suitable field according to your wishes.

Fields are defined to simplify reporting. It must not obstruct; it must be a faithful servant that aids work, not become a burdensome whip or a voracious consumer of various numbers. Employees would slip into mindless data feeding, and subsequent analyses would be worthless. Thanks to well-defined attributes and their automated control, everyone will fill in the necessary data uniformly. For example, one worker won’t fill a field with text while their colleague fills it with numbers.

In Jira, you can also set up pop-up windows that appear when addressing a specific task. This means unnecessary fields don’t need to be filled, only those relevant now. This prevents overloading users, ultimately resulting in higher work efficiency. Similarly attractive is the option to define which fields are mandatory and which are optional. Since a user can’t proceed without filling in the required field, the database of information needed for analysis is always complete.

Last but not least, much essential data is collected automatically. This includes recording changes in process status or maintaining a history of data changes. This makes auditing in the Jira tool very easy and user-friendly.

Clear and concise outputs

In all its versions, Jira offers many built-in reporting options. In the case of Jira Software, these include:

• Burndown Chart (shows the likelihood of meeting the set goal amount of work remaining)
• Sprint Report (displays the volume of completed work and tasks postponed or returned to the backlog)
• Control Chart (length of product cycles, versions, or sprints)
• Cumulative Flow Diagram (overview of task statuses over time)
• Epic Report/Epic Burndown (tracking the progress of work)
• Release Burndown (tracks the progress of work about the planned release date of the version being worked on)
• Velocity Chart (tracks the development of the team’s ability to complete planned work)

And there is much more available.

If you’re using Jira Service Desk for ITSM or communication with external partners or customers, you can also utilise these built-in reports:

• Workload (number of tickets assigned to agents)
• SLA goals (overview of meeting set goals)
• Satisfaction (overview of customer satisfaction with their requests)
• Created vs. Resolved (tracks the number of created and resolved tickets)
• SLA met vs breached (tracks the number of tickets where the goal was met/not met)

With Jira Core (as well as Software and Service Desk), which can capture any workflow in your company, you also have access to these preset reports:

• Average Age Report (shows the age of unresolved tasks)
• Created vs Resolved Issues (displays the volume of created and resolved tasks)
• Pie Chart Report (a pie chart where a predefined attribute groups tasks)
• Recently Created Issues (overview of recently created/completed tasks)
• Resolution Time (overview of the time required to resolve a set of tasks)

Define Your Reports

In addition to using predefined reports, you can define custom reports according to your specific needs. You have various dashboards, gadgets, and filters, whether it’s multiple tables or charts (such as pie charts, bar charts, or line charts).

You can customise everything according to your needs, and the results will be displayed on a dashboard that you can share with other users. This way, all stakeholders can access a current project status overview.

More Complex Reports

However, that’s far from all. So far, we’ve described the essential and straightforward options the Jira tool provides for reporting. In most cases, these are sufficient to cover needs and expectations. However, there may be situations where we need to go beyond the built-in features. Users often utilise the option to export data using a prepared Jira filter to a CSV file. They then transform and analyse this data in common spreadsheet editors (such as Excel) using pivot tables, filtering, and pie or bar charts.

However, this approach is not ideal and often fails to cover all the necessary aspects. Multiple versions of the report may emerge, circulating through emails, and the risk of distortion quickly grows. Reporting then loses its primary and most important function. Standard Jira reports can be extended with interesting additional components that greatly facilitate the creation of complex reports and comprehensive analyses. For example, EazyBI provides complete and centralised reporting, mainly if most of the data included in the report is recorded in Jira.

In cases where reporting involves data from various sources (not just Jira), it’s advisable to use specialised tools such as Tableau. With dedicated data connectors, importing necessary data from Jira into this tool is not a problem. Proper report configuration is essential for successful project management toward colleagues and superiors alike. Continuous monitoring and adjustment of progress and completing individual tasks lead to successful goal achievement. Subsequent analyses can then offer a path to improving and streamlining work processes.

The main advantages of the Jira tool for reporting

• Operational reporting, which serves to sort and evaluate daily activities.
• Predefined reports (Workload, Created vs. Resolved, etc.).
• Project reporting, showing the available outputs for project reporting.
• Managerial reporting showing goal fulfilment and overall project status.
• Customization options according to individual needs.
• The ability to perform complex reporting even from sources outside the Jira tool.

If you’re interested in the topic, watch a video on Agile reports to learn how reporting works.