Is your Jira Cloud Ticket Hierarchy helping you?

I have seen some messy Jira Cloud instances… like really messy. It is rare to get the opportunity to set up Jira from scratch, but I had just that opportunity once before and it solidified the importance of having a holistic view of the configuration. We got to see the impact on our teams of every configuration decision. We couldn’t avoid every pothole. We learned as we went by making 2-way doors whenever possible. The result was that we created a configuration that worked way better than anything we had seen previously.

It is important to remember that just like tech debt, truly messy Jira instances were put in place with the best intentions by people who were doing their best. I have learned that most people set up Jira as a to-do list and then reactively adjusted it to solve new immediate problems.

I love iteration, but you have to have a wider goal. With any workflow or process, it’s important to take a step back and look at the whole picture. Without this, you end up with conflicts and situations that are messy and hard to clean up. There are so many settings and options in Jira. The security and permissions structure alone can be mind-boggling.

If you have seen a messy Jira Cloud instance, you know exactly what I am talking about:

• You do more work to use Jira than Jira does for…