By ServiceRocket's Chief Toolsmith Matt Doar, author of the O'Reilly book Practical JIRA Administration
One way that I regularly help ServiceRocket's customers to use tools such as JIRA is to have them explain how they do their work right now without JIRA. People usually tell me about long email threads and multiple spreadsheets and all the problems they come with. In return, I say that the right tool for the job really depends on what kind of job it is. I don't mean what the job is actually about. I mean who you have to work with to get that job done.
There are at least five kinds of collaborative work that I come across. Starting from 0, they are as follows.
5 Levels of Collaboration in JIRA
Level 0 - Solo, no collaboration needed
This is the easiest and rarest kind of job. JIRA is simply a personal to-do list for you.
Level 1 - Working with someone in your team
One reason we work in teams is so that we can pass the work around between people. It's easy to change the assignee in a JIRA issue, and if they're on your team you probably know who the new assignee should be. If the work is sequential for each person (i.e. I work on it, then you work on it) then this is an effective way to use JIRA.
Level 2 - Parallel pieces of work in a single project
The next level of collaboration is where the work is not sequential. Both you and other team members work on different pieces of the job at the same time. In JIRA this means using a different issue for each piece of work. The different issues could be connected using issue links, but the simplest way to keep related work together is to use sub-issues, where one JIRA issue has multiple child issues. Sub-issues only work within a single JIRA project though.
Level 3 - A few parallel pieces of work in multiple projects
If your different issues are in different JIRA projects, then you have to use issue links to connect them together. Another approach is to use JIRA Agile Epics and add the issues to an Epic for each major piece of work. You could also use labels but they can be rather prone to people spelling the same thing six different ways.
Level 4 - Many different pieces of work
The ultimate level is when you're trying to coordinate lots of work in a large team. This is where JIRA Agile really starts to shine, since you can manage many hundreds of issues on each JIRA Agile board, and have hundreds of boards.
Level 5 - You tell me
Let's take this somewhat JIRA-centric categorization to the limit. What would you use to keep track of some activity that involved over 100,000 separate pieces of work? Tweet at us with your ideas!
