Can JIRA be used outside the IT industry?

Many people might be using JIRA back in their teams for managing projects related to IT. But people from other industries might have questions like:” “Can we use JIRA for HR”, “Can we use JIRA for Pharmaceutical company”, “Can we use JIRA for Manufacturing company”, and so on.

I work for Leanpitch, which is an Agile solutions company as an Atlassian Expert. Whenever I have a conversation with people as part of my consulting work or training, people ask me if JIRA can be used in industries other than Software Industries. Let’s try to figure out if we can really use JIRA in other industries.

To understand if we can use JIRA in other industries, let’s first understand

What is the use of JIRA?

JIRA is basically used for activity/task tracking. The tasks can be anything that you are working on. For eg., if you are working in the Software industry, people might call them User stories, Bugs, and so on.

If you are working in Manufacturing industries, people might call them procurement of spare parts, design, body shopping, and so on. If you are working in a Pharmaceutical company, people might call it the Development of a chemical, filing of an IP, packaging, and so on.

Each activity goes through a life cycle before it gets completed. For eg., when someone in the Car assembly says what’s the progress of a spare part procurement, he would like to know if the spare part is waiting for procurement initialization if the spare part is in transport to the assembly plant, if the quality checked, and so on.

When someone in the HR team says what’s the progress of Selecting a candidate, he would like to know if they have screened the application, interviewer available, interview scheduled, interviewer ok with the candidate, offer letter sent, and so on.

Someone might be using an excel sheet to capture the progress of the activities through their life cycle and others might be using post-its on the wall. Essentially people are tracking the progress of their activities through their life cycle. So the point is, irrespective of the industry you work, you are trying to measure the progress of the activity through its life cycle.

JIRA provides something called a Workflow to capture the progress of the activity through its life cycle something like the below:

Fig:- Spare part procurement

The life cycle of each activity can change based on the industry you are working. JIRA does provide the option of customizing the workflow based on our needs. Thus, JIRA can be customized to suit the needs of any team across many industries.

Now workflows are part of something called Projects in JIRA. If you are wondering what is a project in JIRA and how to configure the workflow in JIRA to suit your team’s needs, irrespective of the industry you are working in, contact me at: jp@leanpitch.com. Click here to learn about configuring JIRA.

With 11+ years of experience in the field, Leanpitch has successfully upskilled 90,000+ people across 12+ countries. Explore our website, Our trainers are internationally acclaimed for their insightful and experiential training.