Over the last two years, the Covid pandemic has forced state and local governments throughout the US to scramble to support a fully remote work environment. Supporting a fully remote work force requires comprehensive changes touching every aspect of IT including cybersecurity, networks, workflows, tools, Agile practices, operating platforms, governance and oversight.

This paper illustrates the Jira configurations, processes, tips, and tricks we developed while supporting a large Department of Defense customer that was migrating to Atlassian Jira to support their adoption of Agile and DevSecOps principles and practices. Rather than providing an Agile transformation how-to recipe, we will describe some of the configurations, templates, processes, and systems we have helped our DoD client establish and the benefits that were observed. We will cover tips and tricks we used to help make the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will cover several scenarios such as supporting a large heterogeneous organization, scaling up to larger efforts, how to supercharge daily standups, enforcing governance, and finding better ways of doing backlog refinement.

A couple of weeks ago I was coaching a group of new Jira users. Any time I am working with people new to the tool I always like to provide context along with anti-patterns. If you are not familiar with the term anti-pattern it simply means a common approach to doing something that seems like a good idea, but in the long-run likely won’t work out very well.

Our organization has a number of Scrum teams working on various projects. Some exhibit much higher velocity than others. Unfortunately, some of the teams with low velocity run the risk of not being able to complete high priority work items in the product backlog. Management is considering whether to replace team members with more experienced and/or skilled members. For example, replacing a mid-level developer with a more senior developer. However, some believe the team is understaffed and that we should add more team members. As consultant coaches, what are some things we should consider? How should we advise our client?