According to the Scrum Guide, Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organisations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. In a nutshell, Scrum requires a Scrum Master to foster an environment where: A Product Owner orders the work for a complex problem into a Product Backlog. The Scrum Team turns a selection of the work into an Increment of value during a Sprint. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint.

Kanban is another popular way of implementing agile. It is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process. Instead of working in time-based sprints, work is continuously delivered in Kanban. It is about envisioning the existing workflow in terms of steps. These steps can be created on the whiteboard or in tools like Jira. The goal of the Kanban execution is to reduce work-in-progress items by ensuring work items move to the next steps quickly to realise business value faster.

Automating the tracking and reporting of Scrum or Kanban KPIs can eliminate the constant manual effort required to create and maintain filters, dashboards in tools like Jira. Instead of relying on regularly updating the filter & gadgets, a fully automated system can pull the right data at the right time, package key metrics such as lead time, throughput, sprint progress, and kanban board work-in-progress trends, along with the insights and send them directly to your inbox on a recurring schedule. This ensures teams always have accurate, timely insights without any dashboard upkeep, thus enabling faster decision-making, greater transparency, and continuous improvement with minimal overhead.

The Automation Workflow

You can refer to the following workflow to implement the automation using n8n tool. The workflow consists of the Schedule Trigger node, OpenAI Chat Model node, Jira nodes for each of the Scrum and Kanban boards, the Outlook node to send a message and the controller node,i.e, the AI Agent node which controls the whole workflow.

Let us go through the settings and functionality of each node as follows.

Schedule Trigger

The Schedule trigger node can be set to trigger the workflow based on the length of the sprint. In my previous blog, i had explained on how to navigate to select a node. For our scenario, the node is set to trigger the workflow once a week, i.e., on Monday at 9AM. In case of a 2-week sprint, we can get to know the status mid-sprint and at the end of the sprint.

Jira Software Tool – Scrum Board

The next node ,i.e, the “Jira Software Tool” node can be used to extract the data from a particular Jira board. Here, we are extracting the data from the Scrum board of the “Scrum project”. The following JQL can be set at the appropriate location (JQL section) in the node as shown in the picture below. The JQL will extract all the Stories, Tasks and Sub tasks from the active sprint that do not have any labels. The node has been renamed to Scrum by editing the default name “Create an issue in Jira Software”. Remember to connect this node to your Jira account with appropriate credentials. You can refer to my earlier blog for the details of connecting the node to your Jira account.

project = "Scrum project" AND sprint in openSprints() AND labels = EMPTY ORDER BY Rank ASC

Jira Software Tool – Kanban Board

The next node too is the “Jira Software Tool” node. Here, as we are extracting the data from a Kanban board, the following JQL can be used to extract all the issue types from the kanban board with labels “test”. The node name has been renamed to Kanban from the default name. You can refer to the input section in the node below to check the requested information from AI Agent node.

project = "Scrum project" AND labels in (test) ORDER BY Rank ASC

OpenAI Chat Model

We will be making use of the OpenAI Chat Model node, similar to the one used in the earlier blog. The settings to connect will be the same, but any other model can be selected from the list as well.

AI Agent

Each of the above nodes need to be connected to this AI Agent node as shown in the above workflow diagram. The prompt section (prompt text file attached below) needs to be input with the appropriate prompt so that the node requests the necessary information to each of the Jira nodes. The outputs from each of the Jira nodes will be further analysed using the OpenAI chat model node. Finally, the formatted output will be sent to the Outlook node that is mentioned in the next section.

Microsoft Outlook

In this final node ,i.e, Send a message node present under Microsoft Outlook node tree, we will first connect to our outlook or hotmail account using the credentials. Once the connection is done, set the Resource, Operation, To, Subject and Message sections appropriately. The Subject section will be the subject of the report mail to be sent. It will consist of the text “Sprint Insights Report” followed by the date and time. The Message section will consist of the output of the AI Agent node.

Once the settings are done and the “Execute workflow” is clicked, the workflow will be triggered and the stakeholder(s) set in the To section of the node will receive the following report mail. Since the outlook node is connected to your hotmail id, the same is used to send mail to the email id set under the To section (gmail id) of your node. In real scenario, there is no need to click on the execute workflow since the workflow will be triggered on a weekly basis by the Schedule Trigger node.

Verification

Now that we have got the report mail with information that is insightful, we can cross-verify the Story/Task/Subtask Summary or names, Assignee and Statuses from each of the Jira Scrum and Kanban boards directly for the correctness of data. Find the screenshot of the Jira Scrum board, Kanban board, Time Spent filter as follows. For the lead time part, refer to the above report “Kanban Board Output” section.

Jira Scrum Board

Jira Kanban Board

Jira Time Spent Filter

Further Reading :

• AI-Powered ITSM with n8n: Integrating Jira SM, OpenAI and Slack
• Optimizing Scrum in Jira: Board Filter, Automation and Dashboard
• Integrating Jira SM Alerts into Kanban Workflow
• Streamline Your Workflow with Jira Kanban Boards
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams

Board Filter Refinement

If we have multiple boards in a project, tasks and stories from one board can appear in another board’s backlog if proper board filters are not set. Additionally, to create a board that only displays work items you want included, you can use filters based on a JQL query.

In the above Scrum board setting, the filter query is set to display only the work items that has the sprint section with some value. Since the board filter is set as above, you can view only the work items within the SP Sprint 1 backlog as the sprint section in each work item is set to SP Sprint 1.

In the same project, you have one more board called Kanbanx ,i.e., Scrum project (SP). The kanban board filter query is set to filter only work items with the labels section set to test.

As you can see in the screenshot below, on the kanban board we can get to see only the work item/s set to the value of test with the sprint section empty.

Advanced Automation Rules

The picture below depicts the branching rule in Jira automation. For any newly created subtask in the project, if the summary contains the letter X, the description field of the work item will be edited to include the text “Notes by Sampath”. The same is depicted in the next picture below.

In the below picture, you can see the subtask with X in the summary part.

However, if the description section does not contain the letter X, then the description will be edited to include the text “General notes:” as shown below.

The last branch rule in the above description update is about adding the Labels as scrum to any subtask that has empty labels.

Another helpful feature in Jira automation is the Multiple work item events. Using this feature, you can trigger the workflow at multiple events of work item without using branches, that can be really helpful in some cases.

Custom Dashboard

In this section on the dashboard, i will introduce you to the usage of a Workload Pie Chart to display the per-person effort of a scrum team. This is an inbuilt Jira feature. Let us say the sprint starts on 3rd and ends on the 16th of September. The JQL filter that we need to create would be as follows. Remember to make the appropriate settings under Filter details so that the data is visible to the concerned person or group.

From the gadget section under Dashboards, select the Workload Pie Chart gadget. You can configure the gadget as follows by selecting the above filter, Statistic Type needs to be set to Assignee, Time field to report on needs to be set to Time Spent. Select the refresh interval appropriately and click on save.

Once you click on the Save button, you will be able to see the following pie chart. Two users have logged the hours in the sprint and hence the respective hours is getting displayed. If more members of the team login in the hours on their subtasks, their efforts will also be displayed.

Further Reading:

• Jira Data Visualization: A Guide to Effective Dashboards
• Essential Jira Automation Rules for Scrum Teams
• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Jira Service Management Forms: Enhancing User Experience
• Integrating Service and Software Workflows on a Single Kanban Board

You can segregate Jira automation into automation rules by using a simple no-code rule builder, which creates automation rules to handle everything from the simplest repetitive tasks to the most complex scenarios. The other type of automation combines the filter feature, which uses JQL, with the subscription feature, where you set conditions to send automated emails.

To access the section wherein you create the automation rules, navigate to the Project settings > Automation > Rules section. Following are some of the automation rules that i have created. This can be particularly useful if you are working on an Agile scrum project.

Sync the status of Subtask to Story and Story to Epic

This automation rule will be useful when the status of a subtask or story changes to In progress and the parent story or epic is in ToDo or Done status. This rule ensures the parent story/epic status syncs with the subtask/story status.

The automation rule consists of steps A-E. Find the details of each step as follows.

Create Subtask with a single click

You can use this automation rule to create a subtask with a single click. An optional step allows you to inform any concerned person about the created new subtask.

After setting the automation rule, a new section appears under “Actions” with the rule name, as shown in the picture below.

This automation rule consists of steps F-H. The settings required for each step are displayed in the picture below. The step H shows the smart value that can be used when you want to display the issue URL in the mail.

Sync the status of Story to Epic

You can use this automation rule to automatically change the status of an epic to “Done” when the status of all its stories changes to “Done.”

You can implement the steps I-M involved in the above rule using the following settings.

Move unassigned Subtask/Story to ToDo from Inprogress

You can use this rule to ensure that all subtasks and stories are assigned before changing their status to “In Progress”. If someone moves an unassigned subtask or story to “In Progress,” the system will move it back to “To Do.” It will include a comment with the current time, issue summary, and the text: “No Assignee added.”

This automation rule involves steps N-Q. The detailed settings for each step are displayed in the picture below. Step Q shows the smart values you can use to display the current time and issue summary.

Check the work log entry and mail assignee

Unlike the other automation rules, you create this one by navigating to Filters > View all filters and clicking on Create filter. The following filter will help you to filter out all the subtasks that have not been updated in the past one day. I found that the issuetype = Sub-task does not filter any subtask in the Jira free tier but does filter out subtasks in the standard version.

After filtering, the next step is to automate sending an email to each assignee. To do this, navigate to Filter details and select Add subscription.

In the next screen, you can select the Recipients as Personal Subscription if you would like to set a mail reminder to yourself. There are other options under Recipients that can be selected if applicable. If you want to add a new group under Recipients you need to have the admin access.

You can customize options like Schedule and Interval as needed. Once you set the subscription, you can add two or more subscriptions to the same filter.

In this blog post, i have provided the above automation examples. However, if you want to explore more on automation rules you can refer to templates that is present under Project settings > Automation > Templates section. One more useful feature is the audit log. You can review an audit log for each of your rules to see when the rule was triggered, the final result of the execution, and any actions that were performed.

Further Reading :

• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Transform Your Task Management with Microsoft Tools
• Advanced Microsoft Outlook Tips and Tricks
• OneNote : Basic to Advanced Guide
• Getting Started With Canva’s Powerful Features

Microsoft tools can be very effective in task management provided the right tools are used for the right purpose. Here, i will be taking you through a few of the most used tools for task management.

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is mainly an email application that allows you to send and receive emails. In addition to emails, it combines calendar, contacts, and tasks in one place.

If there are a few email tasks and work items to be handled, then Outlook can be used for task management using the tasks option. Outlooks tasks directly integrate with Outlook email, allowing you to create tasks from emails. In case of Outlook 365 you can access the Tasks option from the sidebar under the More Apps as shown in the figure below.

Once the tasks option is selected, you will be at the next screen wherein you will see the list of all your tasks that is created by you or shared with you.

Microsoft Calendar

As the number of email tasks, work items increase, the Outlook Tasks App might not be the right tool since the visibility on the progress of tasks might be time consuming to ascertain. This is where the MS Calendar comes handy. Navigate to the Calendar option from the sidebar. In this screen, access the Home > Task option to create a new task.

If you are creating a task from an email, just drag and drop the email on to the calendar icon in the side bar. In the next screen you can set the start, end date and time for the email task.

Microsoft ToDo

In case of Outlook 365, the Microsoft ToDo is integrated with Outlook. Click on the ToDo icon in the sidebar to open the MS ToDo app as shown in the figure below.

Use the “My Day” feature to focus on tasks you want to complete today. ToDo is great for quick task entry and managing personal ToDos. You can create separate lists of tasks for different projects and share them with others for collaborative task management. Since this tool syncs with Outlook tasks, all the Outlook tasks will appear in MS ToDo and viceversa.

Microsoft Planner

At present, there is no integration of Planner with Outlook 365, but you can find this integrated with Microsoft Teams. From the sidebar on MS Teams, click on the Planner icon to open the app as shown in the figure below.

This tool is a combination of MS ToDo and Planner combined into one. At its core, Microsoft Planner is a task management application. You can easily create to-do lists, checklists and projects. The Kanban, charts and calendar views are intuitive for anyone to use and give a clear view of the tasks at hand. Although the features are fewer than other project management tools, they are effective for simple projects.

MS Planner is easy to use, so you won’t have much of a learning curve even if your team hasn’t used Kanban boards before. Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process.

The above Microsoft tools if used efficiently can help transform Task Management , thus improving your productivity.

Further Reading :

• Navigating Jira : From Basics to Advanced
• Useful Tools for IT Professionals
• Few More Useful Tools for IT Professionals
• Useful Microsoft Outlook Tips & Tricks
• Useful Microsoft Teams Tips & Tricks

Jira helps teams plan, assign, track, report, and manage work. It brings teams together for everything from agile software development to customer support. The combination of customizability, agile support, integration capabilities with other tools, issue tracking features, reporting tools, scalability, community support, and deployment options on cloud & on-prem has contributed to the popularity of Jira as a project management tool.

The different types of Jira versions include Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Core, each designed for different project needs. Jira Software supports software development, Jira Service Management caters to service and support teams, and Jira Core functions as a general project management tool.

Company/Team managed project

In Jira Software and Jira Service Management, you have the option to create projects as either team-managed or company-managed. Check the bottom left menu in your project to determine whether you’re in a team-managed or company-managed project.

• Anyone on the team can set up and maintain team-managed projects, making them ideal for autonomous teams that want to control their own working processes and practices within a self-contained space. Another benefit is that they are easier to configure, allowing teams to start quickly.
• Teams prefer company-managed projects for collaborating across multiple projects in a standardized manner, such as sharing a workflow. Company-managed projects involve more complex project configuration compared to team-managed projects, requiring Jira admins to configure screens and schemes.

Agile Project management

Agile project management, primarily used in software development, emphasizes flexibility and collaboration. It incorporates customer feedback throughout the project life cycle. The methodology takes an iterative approach to development, breaking down work into small, manageable cycles called “sprints” to focus on continuous improvement in the development of a product or service.

Jira software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it scrum, kanban, or your own unique flavor. From agile boards, backlogs, roadmaps, reports, to integrations and add-ons you can plan, track, and manage all your agile software development projects from a single tool.

Starting & Closing a sprint on Jira

Sprints only apply to Scrum boards and not to Kanban boards. The scope of the project and the capacity of your team determine the length of a sprint, which can vary from a week to a month. In order to complete a sprint, you must be a Jira Administrator or a user with the manage sprints permission. All subtasks and stories must be closed in the current sprint unless they are being carried forward to the next sprint.

Jira issue types are the basic units of work that must be completed. Depending on the volume of work, you can break an individual issue down into even smaller issues to make the larger piece of work more manageable. Typically, the hierarchical approach in Jira Software begins with epics, followed by tasks, stories, and bugs, and then by subtasks.

After completing sprint planning, enter the stories and subtasks for the upcoming sprint into the Jira backlog, along with their estimates. The epics can be linked to the stories at this stage or once there is clarity on the epics at a later stage.

Enter the minimum sections in the story as shown in the red-framed areas in the picture below.

Enter the story points section marked in the above picture if story points are the basis of your estimation. However, inputting the original estimate in days/hours/mins in addition to the story points, will double the total estimation for the story, so should not be entered. Input the original estimate for a subtask, since hours and minutes need to be logged.

Entering the description area for a story and subtask that explains the mission and goals to be achieved is a good practice. In other words, there will be clarity on the definition of done for a particular story/subtask.

At the end of the sprint, when you have prepared the backlog for the next sprint and have clarity on which subtasks/stories need to be closed or carried forward, you can close the current sprint and start the new sprint.

Tracking work on Jira

Jira provides essential time tracking capabilities. Users can track their worked time and log hours on tasks with the help of the Jira time tracking fields. The comments section should be entered to provide clarity on the tasks performed. Even the work log section has provision to input the description of work done along with time entry.

Jira thinks of time and story points in a certain way. Here’s the math it uses:

• A story point is equivalent to 8 hours.
• 1 week (or 1w) is the same as 5 days.
• 1 day (or 1d) is the same as 8 hours.

Jira time tracking helps to provide a clear understanding of the project progress, estimates, and deadlines.

Service Management

Jira Service Management (Jira SM) is Atlassian’s service management solution for all teams. It helps in

• Empowering every team to deliver great service fast,
• Brings visibility to work, and
• Accelerates the flow of work between development, IT, and business teams.

Jira Service Management provides default ITSM practices (such as standard workflows) so you can customize your service project to meet your company’s rules, regulations and requirements. Your new service project comes with a service catalogue, ITIL workflows and basic reports. You can also set up a knowledge base in Jira Service Management by adding Confluence to your site. Confluence, a web-based corporate wiki and an Atlassian product, easily links with Jira SM and Jira Software.

Jira SM encompasses service management practices like service request, incident, problem, change, knowledge, asset and configuration management. It features 8 standard issue types: Change, IT Help, Incident, New Feature, Problem, Service Request, Service Request with Approval, and Support. For service teams, standard issues represent and track different requests made by your teams and customers. You can find the service requests screen in the following picture.

After creating an issue, you can request additional information from your customer or team members. Attaching another form to the issue allows for more effective collection of this information. You can add any number of forms to issues by selecting “Add form” from the quick-add toolbar.

Forms

Forms in Jira Service Management are customizable interfaces you can use to collect data from users. That way you can make sure that service teams have all the details they need to resolve requests. We can categorize forms in Jira Service Management into two main types: static forms and dynamic forms.

Static forms are the most basic type of forms used in Jira Service Management. They consist of a predetermined set of fields that collect specific information from users. These fields don’t change based on user input; they remain constant regardless of how the form is filled out.

Dynamic forms, on the other hand, are more advanced and interactive. They can change in real-time based on the inputs or selections made by the user. This adaptability is made possible through conditional logic. Using it, we can show or hide fields, change field options, or even alter the form’s flow based on the user’s responses.

Automation

The automation activity allows you to focus on the work that matters, removing the need to perform manual, repetitive tasks by allowing your teams to automate their tasks, processes, and workflows.

Automation rules on Jira consist of three parts: triggers that initiate the rule, conditions that refine it, and actions that execute tasks on your site. Triggers, conditions, and actions form the building blocks of automation. Combine these components to create rules that auto-close old issues or notify specific teams when a release ships. The below picture shows the automation screen and an example scenario.

In the above scenario, an automation ticket creates a new task every 30 days under the issue section.

Filters

A filter is a saved issue search. Jira users can create and manage their own filters and filter subscription.

Quick filters lets you further filter the issues on your Scrum or Kanban board. Your board comes with two pre-configured quick filters for “Only My issues” and “Recently Updated”. You can create more quick filters using Jira Query Language (JQL) for which you must be a Jira admin, project admin or board admin.

In the above picture, you can find one manually created quick filters “ToDo”. The ToDo filter can be used to filter out the stories and subtasks in ToDo status.

This setting will appear under Active sprints section under quick filter. Refer to the below picture for more clarity ,i.e, two of the default filters, Recently Updated and Only My issues under quick filters. The other two filters are manually created ones.

Advanced search

The advanced search allows you to build structured queries using the Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues. JQL is not a database query language, even though it uses SQL-like syntax. You can specify criteria that you can’t define in the quick or basic searches. JQL can help gain key project insights and help you find not just issues but also important information of projects.

Add filter as favorite

Navigate to the Filters>View all issues section and enter the JQL to filter out your issues. In order to add this as favorite, just click on save filter option next to the JQL entry section.

This opens a pop up wherein you need to enter the name and description of the filter along with viewer and editor permission. Subsequently, clicking the save button will save this filter under starred filters. This appears under the default filters on the left side of the screen as shown in the above picture.

Reports & Dashboards

Jira has a range of reports that enable you to visualize trends about your project, versions, epics, sprints, and issues. It categorizes reports into four types:

• Agile reports
• DevOps reports
• Issue analysis reports
• Forecast and management report

Teams frequently use reports like burndown charts, velocity charts, sprint reports, and control charts to measure the sprint performance.

On Jira, the dashboard enjoys great visibility and has become the primary place in the system to view reports of Jira data and connected systems. You can add and arrange gadgets on a Jira dashboard. Also, you can share dashboard pages with a user, group, or the entire organization. This makes dashboards the perfect tool to create and share report pages dedicated to specific projects and types of reporting.

Further Reading :

• ITSM and System Management Tools : A Basic Guide
• JP1/ITDM2 : A Basic Guide
• ITIL 4 Foundation : Getting Started Guide
• Data Visualization : MS Excel Dashboard Basics
• Microsoft Forms : Getting Started Guide