At a Glance
Winningtemp, a company that provides an AI-powered platform to improve employee experience and engagement, aims to ensure its team members remain empowered, not constricting them to a time tracking system. However, dedicating the majority of time to business-critical deliverables was also a priority, and it was difficult to evaluate and report on this with basic Jira functions. Adding JQL Search Extensions for Jira proved to be the solution they needed.
The Challenge of Complex Reporting in Jira
Finding the right data and manually compiling reports for multiple teams can be a huge drain on a project manager’s time. Even if all the information is in Jira, it’s often not easy to locate quickly. This is the problem that Johan Olofsson at Winningtemp faced. He wanted to track and report on how his teams were spending their time, but the complex subtasks in their Jira instance made that a challenge.
Johan is an engineering manager at Winningtemp who manages nine developers, working with two features teams on the customer-facing portion of the platform and is responsible for ensuring that deliverables are completed efficiently and on-time.
As an agile workplace with a culture that places a priority on employee wellbeing and autonomy, Winningtemp doesn’t use traditional time-tracking solutions. They don’t want employees to feel they have to report every minute of their day. However, they also want to ensure that the majority of time is spent on business-critical deliverables that give the greatest value to customers. These deliverables are found in the roadmap.
Johan was concerned that too much time was spent on tasks that fell outside the roadmap goals. These other tasks included bug fixes, improvements, and custom features designed for specific clients. While all of these have their place, the aim was to spend 70% of time on roadmap tasks. A third team also wanted assistance on reporting on this. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell if that was happening.
With multiple teams in their Jira instance and projects divided into epics, stories, and issues with many subtasks, finding which tasks took up the bulk of the time was complex. Johan tried using basic JQL to search Jira and create a filter to create the reports he needed, but basic JQL doesn’t allow users to combine tasks and subtasks in the same query.
Next, Johan went to the Atlassian Community for assistance. He found that others had posted similar problems, and members suggested using an app to expand JQL’s capabilities. After exploring Marketplace, Johan was down to two choices, ScriptRunner and JQL Search Extensions for Jira. He decided on JQL Search Extensions for Jira because of its affordable pricing for the 11-100 user range and because, unlike ScriptRunner which focuses more on automation, it was solely focused on search.
It helped that someone in the Jira community had posted that I should be able to solve my issues with this app. It makes you more persistent if someone has said that you can do it; you just need to figure out how it’s done.
Johan Olofsson
Implementing Extended Search for Efficient, Transparent Reports
Once Johan began his trial of JQL Search Extensions, his main goal was to set up three reports for each of the three teams — one for two-week segments, one for quarters, and one for the year. Each of these was in a pie chart with four sections — roadmap, bugs, improvements, and Imacs (custom features). To accomplish this, he needed a total of 36 filters.
With JQL Search Extensions, he was able to use the exact queries to create these filters. He found that the most useful query was childrenOfQueriesInIssueRecursive because this allowed him to include all subtasks.
The initial implementation didn’t proceed completely smoothly as he had some difficulty working with so many filters with similar names. There was no way to sort the filters; they were only in a list following the order in which they were created. This made it hard to see which filters should be plugged into which dashboard.
Johan reached out to Digital Toucan for support with this problem and was amazed at their quick response. He spoke to Daniel, the lead developer of the app, and Daniel immediately realized this was a serious lack in the app’s user interface. In just one day, the Digital Toucan team created an update that allowed users to sort the filters easily.
With this fix, Johan was able to set up the dashboards exactly as he needed to so that his teams could see which types of issues were taking up their time. Now, they’re able to more effectively manage their time and prioritize the issues that bring the greatest benefit to their clients.
How Can JQL Search Extensions Help Your Business?
Implementing JQL Search Extensions for Jira resolved Johan’s problem with tracking and reporting on time spent on certain types of tasks and subtasks. Setting up the filters took a couple of days, but once they were in place, regular reports could be instantly generated. Viewing the dashboards helps all team members involved visualize where they may need to shift their priorities.
Johan highly recommends JQL Search Extensions for Jira for all companies facing similar challenges with Jira reporting. With its reasonable price point, focus on search, ease of use, and excellent customer service, it’s the obvious choice.
Great service and great support, implementing the sorting the very day I asked for it. I’ve never seen that kind of service before!
Johan Olofsson
If you need to search your Jira instance more efficiently and create filters to generate reports, why not do what Winningtemp did?
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