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At the agency I work at, I notice that to finish a task, I end up perusing several sources to get the assets I need. (The initial ticket in Jira, Gmail, Drive, etc)

I feel as though everything I need (or, if I'm delegating a task, everything the person who's assigned needs) should be at least linked in their work task.

How can I encourage people to put all required information directly in the initial ticket?

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  • Unfortunately questions seeking opinions are off topic for this site and therefore your question is likely to be closed.
    – Marv Mills
    May 14, 2015 at 15:30
  • 1
    Maybe you can reformulate your question to ask how to deal with such a circumstance. I can imagine others have this problem too.
    – Tob
    May 14, 2015 at 18:54
  • Have a look on this page to avoid off-topic posts: pm.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask
    – Tob
    May 14, 2015 at 19:04

2 Answers 2

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Your gut feeling is pointing you in the right direction, toward the practice of full kitting tasks before those tasks are initiated.

Essentially, full kitting means that all of the inputs requires to complete a task are collected into a set before that task is initiated. Inputs can include information (manuals, instructions, data), physical materials, tools that will be used to do the work, and the availability of needed resources and people. I'm having difficulty finding a quality, online reference to link to. Kitting is a concept used in both Theory of Constraints and Lean methodologies.

Some tools for kitting in software projects include:

  1. Public source code repositories like GitHub or GitLab
  2. Wikis for documentation
  3. User stories with acceptance criteria
  4. Wireframe user interface mockups
  5. Links to deployed web services

All of the above can be associated with a Jira task as it moves through your team's workflow, either as an attachment or linked resource. This approach will likely work with other software too if your team chooses a different took than Jira. Some software, for example Kanbanery, will allow a task to be marked as "ready to pull" meaning that all elements of the kit have been collected and the task is ready for a team member to begin working on it.

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  • Awesome! Is there a link you can point me to with more info?
    – xyhhx
    May 19, 2015 at 18:37
  • I will try to add better references soon. When I drafted the answer above I noticed that a lot of the "kitting" material appears to be elaborated in books and offline resources (most Theory of Constraints material is either in books or material owned by consultants). That's unfortunate. Hopefully I can find some public references.
    – Michael Hogan
    May 20, 2015 at 22:43
  • I've been looking around for "full kitting" but I'm not finding anything. I would like to push this amongst the PM's here, but I need something a bit more solid ;)
    – xyhhx
    Jun 1, 2015 at 18:02
  • @Martin, Realization, a critical chain project management consulting company, is one place you can go for professional-grade assistance.
    – Michael Hogan
    Jun 8, 2015 at 13:08
  • @Martin, here is an article on the basic concepts of kitting. As used in the article, "kitting" is a term from the manufacturing practice of "Kanban". It is reasonable to apply Kanban manufacturing concepts to Kanban software development workflows.
    – Michael Hogan
    Jun 8, 2015 at 13:11
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I totally agree that it helps a lot, to bring all necessary information together. Nothing annoys more than going through some tree structure searching for an information several times a day.

What I learned is, that using systems that provide URLs simplifies this issue a lot (e.g. web links):

  • URLs can be processed by a lot of tools
  • The URL target application can be independent from the application the link is presented
  • Opening the URL is a simple click

Most modern system engineering tools provide URLs / links to call specific information (Jira, Confluence Wiki, Doors, git, ...).

What ever tool you are using to provide task descriptions, it will be most likely able to deal with links (e.g. web browser MS Word).

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