We all know how JIRA is an effective project management tool used in different verticals & across the various team sizes. Primarily this flexibility is attributed to the customisable workflows that JIRA has to offer. Add to this the ability to add custom fields to JIRA issues & you are left with no choice but to accept the fact that you can manage almost any conceivable project in JIRA. In recent years, Atlassian’s marketplace is getting significant traction from the businesses using JIRA. Number of new add-ons are being added daily & the number of customers using these add-ons is going through the roof.
When we started using JIRA, we saw an opportunity to further enhance the collaboration paradigm. Then came UpRaise for Employee Success. UpRaise extends JIRA for Goal setting, Continuous feedback & Performance reviews. While there are umpteen reasons why UpRaise stands out in comparison to other applications, in this post we will only address how one can make use of UpRaise for continuous feedback, recognition & coaching in JIRA.
Continuous feedback set-up in UpRaise
JIRA is home to different kinds of projects – external, internal, software development, IT support, marketing, leaves & expenses management & the list is literally unending. Not all of these projects would need to be connected with continuous feedback. And since UpRaise lets you connect the feedback directly with a JIRA issue, it makes sense to exclude such projects from the continuous feedback reach.
Another important aspect in settings is the ability to customise feedback tags. Feedback tags are like badges or classifiers, these tags – including their descriptions & colours can be modified to match your company culture. For example, the default ones are I’m a Fan, Fantastic work, Keep up & Improve. Some of the teams use medals instead, so their feedback tags would look like below.
For a more formal environment this could even turn into direct ratings 1,2,3 or A,B,C. Once your users are added to UpRaise and this part is set up your team is ready to praise & coach each other in real-time.
Giving feedback
There is no restriction as to who can give feedback to whom. Sharing this feedback with relevant co-workers or receiver & his manager or any other way, is completely upto you. This feedback can be tied to a JIRA issue or can be independent of one. If it is associated with a JIRA issue, the feedback will also appear in the UpRaise issue panel. This is how the Give Feedback pop-up looks like.
Labels against a feedback is a recently added feature that lets you further classify this feedback against your company values or competencies or any other way it makes sense for you. Some of the labels that we have seen our customers use are – Honest, Innovator, Code Ninja, Reliable etc.
Requesting feedback
Contrary to popular thinking everyone wants to get a feedback on his work & how he can improve further. Lack of facilitating tools is one of the major reasons the continuous feedback cycle tends to die out. Now with UpRaise all of that is to change, one can request feedback from peers or managers or even direct reports. You can request feedback for yourself or for someone who has just joined & you want to keep an eye on their progress. Use cases are endless.
How to make the most of it
UpRaise organises all this data into one place for easy access, reports trends at individual, team & company level. When used religiously your team members will have gathered enough feedback that will come in handy at the time of filling up performance appraisal forms. Given that all of this happens within JIRA, the adoption of continuous feedback could be unprecedented if the team starts on the right note.
