MVP Microsoft Ignite Spotlight – Jira and Teams: Staying In The Flow of Work

For Ignite this year, we asked a panel of our MVP Community real world experts to join us at Ignite and share what they felt were the most impactful, currently available, Teams features for IT pros and their users.

The on-demand session, Microsoft Teams Best Practices, Tips and Tricks from our experts, these MVPs presented 9 topics and demos in a 40-minute session. Many of you reached out saying you loved the session but wanted a deeper dive into the topic.

In this blog series we, we will hear from each of our presenters, as they will walk you through their demos and share tips, tricks, and resources so you can reproduce these experiences in your environment today.

Darrell “As A Service” Webster- Jira and Teams- Staying In The Flow of Work

Darrell is a Principal Change Management and Adoption Consultant at WM Reply, and founder of Modern Workplace Change.

He helps organizations make the most of the Microsoft Cloud after they get there, sharing tips and productivity advice for Microsoft 365.

Darrell’s key interest is helping enterprises, businesses and schools to understand how to effectively use Microsoft 365 online services, to work from anywhere using mobility, device and cloud technologies. He focuses on getting the knowledge to the end user, so they can make the most of the tools they have available. Darrell says, "with a name like Webster, I was born to work with online services."

In previous roles, Darrell has been a Partner Technical Strategist for BitTitan and a SharePoint training specialist for ShareThePoint.com, where he delivered courses and consulting to businesses and schools in New Zealand. Darrell received the MVP award while he was employed as a Microsoft Office 365 Technical Consultant for Olympic Software. In 2008 he took a break from IT and worked delivering snail-mail as a cycling postman. He now has a deep appreciation for email and real time communications after spending hours on a bicycle, loaded with letters, magazines, and packages. Little known fact, Darrell is also a huge Pokémon fanatic who over the years has collected over 500k pieces of Pikachu memorabilia in his home.

Prior to this extended IT sabbatical, Darrell worked with Office Communications Server, Remote Access, and mobility technologies. He has worked supporting IT in several industries, printing, concrete construction, retail and medical.

How did Darrell get his first position in the IT industry? Because he could touch type and because of his primary school teacher training.

Jira and Teams- Staying In The Flow of Work

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork and teams benefit from connecting third-party apps into this collaboration platform. Atlassian has worked hard to make essential information from their platform accessible in Teams while keeping people in the flow of work. Jira is an app that supports collaboration as it moves at the pace of conversation.

The start of our day is all about planning what we will work on. Checking conversations. Checking for new tasks or issues assigned to me. Ideally, this experience should be as smooth as possible to get into the context of work. Changing between different tools can be distracting. When planning work, prioritising is important. Some tasks are prioritised by the people assigning the task. But we also need to aggregate and prioritise what we want to work on. Simple filters that focus on different topics, clients, or showing me issues assigned to me, all help to plan my work and prioritise the order.

Jira Cloud provides a quick place to focus on work assigned to me, opening the Jira bot in the Teams Chat app. I can see the latest issues assigned to me and their priority. When I open an issue, I like that it opens in a modal window over the top of Teams. It doesn’t try to take me into the Jira Cloud web app in my browser. I’m still in Teams as I review issues and plan my work. This is a recurring theme with Jira Cloud. It has been bold enough to deliver most of the information I need without taking me out of my flow and into a separate experience in their product. It reduces distractions while I review the issue and consider my next action. When I have finished reviewing the issue, closing the modal window takes me back into Teams. I can focus on taking the next action, which might be to start a conversation with a person mentioned in an issue.

Jira Cloud is just as smooth in the Chat experience of Teams, where conversation leads to richer context of an issue. In a chat or Teams call about the issue, it is helpful to share the details. We should do whatever we can to ease other people into our context, bring them up to speed. In today’s back-to-back hybrid work world, it’s just good ‘modern work manners.’ Teams messaging extensions are the apps we can use in our conversations to reference the details. Jira Cloud’s messaging extension is simple and effective. It suggests issues you have been working on so you can add it quickly to a conversation and get back to the discussion. The issue is added as a card in the conversation with just enough detail to recognise it. You can add a card to the chat, even while in a Teams call.

The issue opens in a modal window again, over the top of the chat. The chat may continue in the background while the ticket is read and updated. Closing the modal window takes you back to your conversation. See, this is what matters. While the experience is simple and under-appreciated, that’s the point. When third-party Teams app is integrated well, you are kept in the flow of work, and you barely notice an impact to your train of thought.

A reply in the conversation about an issue can contain valuable detail, great ideas, and possible solutions. But it shouldn’t remain trapped in the conversation. We spend much of our time recalling details of discussions, searching email and chat for a remark or reference that will help us with our current task. It should be easy to extract that value and share it in the place where it’s most useful. In a conversation about an issue, Jira Cloud provides a way to add a reply as a comment on the issue. It is faster than copying and pasting content and contains a reference back to the conversation. This is smart. Turning a reply into a comment on the issue ensures my team are kept up to date with relevant details, especially when they may not have access to the conversation. If you haven’t got in the habit of adding comments directly on the card, this is a simple way to add a comment with the chat reply.

The Jira Cloud app is a great example of third-party integration. It keeps me in a conversation about an issue, providing easy access to the details and enables me to keep my team in the loop with comments.

This is what it means to stay in the flow of work.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-community-blog/mvp-microsoft-ignite-spotlight-jira-and-teams-staying-in-the/ba-p/3656962 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-community-blog/mvp-microsoft-ignite-spotlight-jira-and-teams-staying-in-the/ba-p/3656962 2022-10-19 16:00:00Z