What is Jira Work Management Cloud?

Jira Work Management is a collaboration tool designed to help teams track all activity considered work. Work might include running projects, managing approval processes, performing daily and periodic tasks, creating documents, and a lot more.

In Jira Work Management, your team gets a shared view of what needs to be done, what's in progress, and who's assigned to what.

Jira Work Management isn't like most other work tools, so if you haven't used it (or any other Jira product) before, here's a few key concepts to get familiar with.

Work is represented by ‘issues’

'Issue' is the name we give to work items in Jira Work Management. An issue can represent an activity, a document, an asset (creative or concrete), a purchase or even a person. You can create your own issue types to suit your work processes.

For example, a marketing department might have these issue types:

• Task - for doing any work task such as designing, invoicing, creating documents, etc.

• Asset - for keeping an inventory of creative assets, like branding materials and photos.

• Website - for tracking activity related to website changes.

Issues are managed within projects

Projects are a way to group issues, and clearly define what and how work gets done.

Some people set up Jira Work Management with separate projects for business units, like HR, finance, and marketing. Others set up their clients in separate projects; a creative agency or a construction company tracking big jobs might do this.

A project provides a shared view of work for the team, and enables leads and managers to see where more help might be needed or where an activity is not progressing. It also acts like a 'to do list', so tasks can be added at any time and then picked up after other tasks are completed.

Issues are tracked along workflows

A workflow defines the steps that progress an issue from unstarted to completed. Workflows are made up of statuses (issue states) and transitions (issue actions).

Workflows are usually modeled on existing business processes, so they can be as simple or as complex as you need them to be. It is common for different issue types to have different workflows.

For example, a 'task' issue might have a simple workflow like:

But for a different issue type—say for an HR team tracking candidates—it might look like:

As work gets done on an issue, the assigned person moves it through the workflow, to transition the status. Issue status is critical for accurate visibility of work, for example, to ensure that all web changes include analytics before being published.

Admins make things better

Whatever kind of Jira Work Management project you work in, you're sometimes going to notice that things could work a little better. When you do, speak to an admin.

There are two kinds. Here are some of the different things they do:

Jira admin

This person usually belongs to an IT department or is the product purchaser. They can:

• Create new projects

• Control user access

• Manage shared configurations

• Extend user licenses

Project admin

This person might be a department manager, project lead, or client account manager. They can:

• Manage project settings

• Control project-level access

• Set up project-specific workflows and custom elements

If you're a new project admin who hasn't worked with Jira Work Management before, check out how to get started as a project administrator.

You might also like...

• See what's possible with Jira Work Management

• Getting started as a user

• How do I build the workflow I want?

• Webinar: Learn how Jira Work Management can work in all areas of your business

• Introduction: Say hello to Jira Work Management

• Introduction: Everything you need to know about Jira Work Management