Best practices for managing queues at scale
Queues are critical for service projects, since your agents use queues to categorize, prioritize, and take actions on work items. Queues also act as filters for work items. They can be set to show specific work items based on their type, status or something else, using a JQL statement.
As teams grow, it is important for you, as a project admin to consider how you set up your queues so the team can manage work items efficiently, which includes managing load times but also mental load for your team.
Prioritize work for your team
From your project’s sidebar, queues are displayed under: Starred, any ‘priority groups’ created in the project, and View all queues. Queues in Starred and your ‘Priority groups’ will refresh and update their work item counts regularly. Queues under View all queues do not refresh, and are collapsed by default.
Any given queue will only refresh its count up until 999 work items at which point it will display 999+. For the best experience, agents should only see and refresh the queues that are relevant to them.
Recommendations:
Consider which queues are critical to the success of your individual teams (for example, high priority, expiring SLA, and/or high impact). Organizing these queues to their respective priority group helps your agents work on the right set of queues that are most important to their own team. Agents can freely switch between priority groups to change focuses. Find out how to prioritize queues by groups
Tip: Encourage agents to Star the queues that are most relevant to themselves. Read more about starring queues.
Avoid queues that attempt to return too many work items
These queues have often been there since the beginning of your project. They help small teams visualize and design a structure that helps them grow. But as the number of work items in the project and site grow, these queues become a performance burden, especially when they are included in the refreshing sections.
Recommendations:
Show only recent work items, e.g. use updateDate < 14d in your JQL.
Use filters for viewing and managing large work item sets. Learn more about advanced searching in Jira Cloud.
Reconfigure queues that use complex JQL clauses
All queues utilise Jira Query Language (JQL), which is Atlassian’s proprietary language for querying work items. Similar to other database queries. Often it is better to have multiple simple queues than one complex one. Learn more about optimising JQL.
Recommendations:
Avoid queues that analyse across multiple custom fields, complex functions, and/or labels.
JQL clauses provided by Marketplace apps installed on your site can sometimes be problematic. Reduce their use if a queue is underperforming.
Update the queues that search text fields for keywords
It is possible to create queues that will perform full-text searches across work items. These queues perform on-the-fly categorization, and might suggest room for improvement in your work item structure. For example, you might be trying to extract “summary ~ ‘fault’” or “description ~ ‘component name’” or the worst of all “text ~ ‘thing’”.
We recommend:
using request types and hidden fields to help customer categorize work items at point of creation, then build queues based on categories
Automation rules to categorize work items (e.g. applying components or labels) then build queues based on categories.
Use Filters or Search for finding specific work items.
Build dynamic queues that work for individuals
Queues in ‘priority groups’ are sometimes not for everyone. When faced with all the noise of a busy project, it’s not uncommon for individuals to create queues for themselves. Although this might boost their productivity, it will slow everyone else down who has to see and load a queue that is irrelevant to them.
We recommend:
building dynamic, personalized queues using JQL functions like “currentUser()”
encouraging your agents to star queues that are relevant to them
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