Do Jira projects or templates exist for a team of technical writers?

[Jim Gilliam]

Hi.  I'm team leader for our documentation team.  Our development teams use Jira, but technical writers don't really fit into the Agile processes.

We've been asked to research how Jira could help our doc team track our help authoring work, and how is the best way for technical writers to leverage Jira.

Do you have any case studies or templates we could explore?  I searched project templates, but I didn't see anything related to help documentation.

What's your advice or suggestions?

Thanks,

Jim

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jim Gilliam 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

I used Google to do a search for "jira cloud for technical writers" and found several articles on the topic.

The question really is what is the team's process for their work-items/deliverables?

Jira is very customizable. Even if you don't use "agile" methodology in the traditional sense you can still use Jira. Do you get assigned work items that go through a ToDo-InProgress-Done lifecycle? If so, you can use Jira! 

Do you need to be able to report on the current state of your work items; which ones are done, which ones are in progress, and which ones haven't been started? You can get that from Jira!

Do you need to keep track of who is assigned to produce a deliverable? Jira can do that!

Start by defining what it means to "track our help authoring work". What do you need to track? What is the lifecycle of those items? What sort of reports do you need, at what frequency, for what audience?

[Jim Gilliam]

Thanks for the advice, Trudy. I appreciate it.

[Deleted user]

Still it would be interesting to know if Atlassian's doc team uses Jira to track work, and which template they use . . 

[Jim Gilliam]

Maybe that would have been a better question for me to ask, Carolyn.  Thanks for bringing it up!  :) 

I'd love to know what the Atlassian documentation team(s) workflow is and the tools they use.

[Deleted user]

Your question was great Jim, I had done a search to find exactly the same thing and ended up on this page. And Trudy's answer was also helpful. . . I have heard Atlassian Information Experience experts speak at meetups  (Atlassian's tech writers work out of the UX team or at least once did--and it makes a lot of sense) --and they do things really well, so it made sense to me to ask this followup.