3 Reasons why to use Jira in Management Processes | Reason #1

In this series of blog posts we give you three reasons, why it is in many cases a good idea to manage business processes in Jira from Atlassian. Even if you have dedicated software solutions like SAP. 

 #1 Strict Processes

To illustrate the concept, we choose contract management. Because even in large companies we often observe, that a simple process like concluding a contract may cause some issues. In most cases the shortcomings result from the fact, that different departments are involved and some of them my use their own software solution. If they use any software at all. What is missing, is a higher level of control that brings different departments, processes and software solutions together.

Jira does the trick. E. g. by depicting each contract by a ticket, this single ticket serves as a circular for this contract. As a result, each person in the process gets this ticket when his action is needed. He then comments his contribution, uploads documents and transitions the ticket to the next status. Let us explain the principle by an example. Someone from the management needs a contract with a new supplier. He then creates a ticket of the type 'Contract', describes the purpose, enters the contact details of the supplier and specifies the costs. He then transfers the ticket to the Line Manager for commercial release. After this, the ticket will be set to status "Legal". The Legal Department then checks the contract for regulatory compliance, tracks all possible queries and hands the ticket over to the Purchasing Department for negotiations. In the moment the contract is concluded, this contract is set to status "Active" where it stays as long as this contract is valid. An additional "Review" status may be added, to trigger and track regular reviews.

This concept enables you to get the full overview of your contracts, their current statuses and to identify bottlenecks. With dashboards and filters, e. g. the following questions can be answered easily: How many contracts do we have currently? How many contracts are in the pipeline? Have we reviewed all current contracts this year? Ist this contract still at the Legal Department? How many NDAs do we have? 

In part two of this series, we will cover the the second reason, transparency, for using Jira in business processes.