I work in a big company with over 50k employees. Our team handles 2nd and 3rd level infrastructure support. We don’t do dev ops or CICD. Just servers and configs.
Our Jira setup seems to favor developers. They make up about 80% of our IT staff. The metrics used to show our team’s value don’t fit well. For example cycle time in blue statuses can be affected by long waits for other teams. The company-wide max cycle time is 5 days. We can’t use the blocked status as it just wastes time.
I’m meeting with the higher-ups soon. I want to talk about cycle time and how we’re graded. But I feel like I’m missing other important points about using Jira for infrastructure teams.
We can’t switch from Jira. It’s used everywhere in the company and it’s the only tool for metrics. Any ideas on what else I should bring up in this meeting?
yo, i feel ur pain. jira can be a real pain for infra teams. maybe suggest custom fields for stuff like impact on biz or complexity? that’d show ur real value. also, diff SLAs for diff issues makes sense. 5 days aint always realistic. maybe automate some stuff with monitoring tools too? that’d be sweet. good luck with the bigwigs!
In my experience, infrastructure teams often face the challenge of having their work process overlooked by standard Jira configurations. It’s important to highlight that the unique aspects of infrastructure work—like scheduled maintenance and inter-team dependencies—require workflows tailored specifically to these scenarios. Customizing ticket attributes to include elements such as server types or environment impacts can provide clearer insights into your team’s performance. Additionally, leveraging Jira’s automation capabilities for notifications and status updates could minimize delays and improve overall clarity in the ticket lifecycle.
Having worked in a similar environment, I can relate to your struggles. One crucial aspect to address is the need for custom fields that reflect infrastructure-specific metrics. These could include downtime impact, affected services, or resolution complexity. Such fields provide a more accurate representation of your team’s value and challenges.
Another point to consider is implementing a tiered SLA system based on incident severity. This approach acknowledges that not all infrastructure issues can be resolved within a uniform 5-day window. It’s also worth exploring Jira’s reporting capabilities to create dashboards that showcase infrastructure-centric KPIs, like system availability or mean time to recovery.
Lastly, discuss the possibility of integrating Jira with monitoring tools. This integration can automate ticket creation for certain issues, improving response times and providing a more holistic view of your team’s workload and efficiency.