How to use Jira for project management

Jack Wallen takes you through the steps on how Jira templates can be used to fill your project management needs.

Jira is primarily used for issue tracking, but that doesn’t mean it’s limited solely to that purpose. Jira can also serve as a general project management platform to help you plan, track and manage your agile software development projects, without having to do much extra work or install any third-party software.

SEE: Hiring kit: Project manager (TechRepublic Premium)

In fact, Jira includes a handy Project Management template that offers a simple workflow to help your teams better collaborate and track tasks associated with a project.

This Project Management template is ideal for both small and large projects, short-term projects, personal projects and even ad hoc activities. The template includes kanban boards, a summary, issue tracking and reports. And the Jira project management workflow is very simple, as it follows the To Do, In Progress, Done methodology.

Let’s create a new project to manage with that template.

What you’ll need to manage projects in Jira

The only thing you’ll need to make this work is a Jira account. That’s it. Let’s see how easy it is to make Jira work for your project management needs.

How to use the Project Management template

Log in to your Jira account, which is best done from https://start.atlassian.com, and then, click Jira Work Management (Figure A).

Figure A

On the resulting page (Figure B), click Create Project.

Figure B

In the next window (Figure C), click Work Management in the left pane, and then, click Project Management.

Figure C

In the resulting window (Figure D), name the new project, and click Create Project.

Figure D

Once the new project has been created, you’ll find yourself in its home (Figure E), where you can access options for Kanban, List, Calendar, Timeline, Forms, Pages, Issues, Reports and more.

Figure E

And that, my friends, is all there is to using Jira for project management. At this point, you should know exactly what to do next. Configure your lists, add items, track issues and more with this user-friendly project management template.

If, however, you’re new to project management, I highly recommend you start with the Board option because that feature should be the easiest to get up to speed with. For those who’d like to know more about using kanban in Jira, make sure to check out How to create a kanban board in Jira.

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