How to Keep Customers and External Parties Up To Date?
I am a project manager, working on one of our largest accounts. We hold weekly followups with the customer.
Each Wednesday morning I need to send them an up to date report, in preparation toward our Wednesday afternoon meeting. In the past I used to export Jira data to Excel, review it an ensure that it provides the correct picture without disclosing any internal noise (like the internal discussion about weather this specific customer request is justified, or some reference- so awkward- to another customer). Once properly cleaned, the excel would have been attached to a Confluence page, for sharing.
Finally, with Jira Snapshots for Confluence, I can now not only save precious time each week, but also look more professional.
My customer especially loves how its easy for them to compare the status report of this week to the previous one- in one view they see what changed.
Use case by @Rina Nir _RadBee . RadBee’s CEO “We cannot remove the burden of regulatory compliance, but we surely can rid teams from the waste of time”
Tips
Our Jira is configured with a custom field called “Notes”. We are using this field solely for customer communication (via Jira Snapshots reports) so its' easy to keep the field informative and clean from internal clutter. Our customer does not have access to the Jira data directly.
JQL:
Level 1 of the report selects our Epics:
project=DEVT AND issuetype=Epic order by key ASC
Level 2 selects the issues within those Epics, and orders them in an order that makes sense to us:
"Epic Link"=$key ORDER BY resolution, sprint, rank ASC
Here is how to do it
Login to Confluence and create a new page. Add to it all the free text sections, like ‘Overview’:
In the top editor toolbar, click the “+” icon and type “sna” in the search bar. Then, select the “Jira snapshots” macro.
In the “Edit Jira Snapshots Macro” overlay:
Enter a title in the “Level title” field to represent the first level or “list” of Jira issues.
Enter a query in the “Search JQL” field to limit the scope of issues, like:
"Epic Link"=$key ORDER BY resolution, sprint, rank ASC
In the “Add fields to display” field, select the desired columns.
We are adding the field “Notes” which in our team, is always kept clean and is only used for customer communication.
Our report includes also the issues within the Epic, so we’ll press the button “+ Add new level”
Enter a title for the 2nd level
Enter a query in the “Search JQL” field. This time it needs to link with Level 1, like:
In the “Add fields to display” field, select the desired columns.
Click the “Insert” button at the bottom right to complete the macro’s configuration.
Click the “Publish” button.
Finally, click the “Take New Snapshot” button to generate a static list of issues.
Here’s the finished result- for the first week
The following week: Just take a new Snapshot on the same page. Your customers will be able o compare the status of the current week with the status in the previous week- by clicking the “Compare current version to previous”