Proving Progress - How I Am Using Jira to Argue for Promotion, Make a Personal Scoreboard, and More

Tracking my work done has been huge for banishing imposter syndrome. Plus, who doesn't love a nice graph? It's so satisfying to be able to point to something and confidently say "This quarter/year 50% of my tasks were features, 25% were bugs, 20% were tech debt, and 10% were investigations."

I happen to know that last year, my productivity climbed consistently from January - March. This makes sense, because I was in my first year with the company, and was still in the ramp-up period. Later, I can see that productivity dropped off sharply in October... and I can confidently say that's because I had several high-story-point tickets on my plate.

If my work speed were to be questioned, I would have both an explanation and perhaps a case for having the team break tickets down further. Would highly recommend keeping track of this for your own records - it doesn't require you to do any tracking yourself beyond what you're doing daily by moving your todo list around, and can really shed a light into where your time is going.

And I was able to include proof of a fairly steep ramp-up as consideration for promotion in the first year. I'm excited to see insights for the next few years.

Here's how I approach this. A quick google search suggests that the broad steps here are applicable to Asana, Basecamp, Monday, and probably just about any major ticket tracking software.

The whole things takes probably half an hour to an hour to do manually for the first time, especially if you're not used to making graphs. So far I've only done it twice, but I am already thinking of ways to automate it.

Find your tickets from the past year and export them to your favorite spreadsheet storage

In Jira, go to the issue search view and choose 'switch to JQL' to write your own queries. Use something like

assignee = currentUser() AND status = "Done" AND resolutionDate >= startOfYear()

to get a visual list of your completed tickets since the start of the current year.

This may not work for you exactly; play around with the values your team uses. For example, my team doesn't resolve tickets that way, so I used the last updated date.

assignee = currentUser() AND status = "Done" AND updatedDate >= startOfYear()

Can pass -1 to startOfYear() to make it tickets within the past year.

From there, you can export the data to a .csv and upload it into Google Sheets, Notion, or your visualization software of choice.

I chose google sheets because it's free and easy. I can imagine making some truly excellent presentations with other software, but sheets was enough for my personal data for now.

Ideas for Using This Data

Find your most productive month or quarter

The first thing I did was group my data by months and sum the entries for each month to see how many tickets I'd completed each month. That was fairly validating by itself.

Figure out where you time is going

Next, I made a pie chart of the ticket types so I could see the breakdown of features/bugs/debt/investigation tickets. It's fun to see what percentage of your time goes to what type of tasks. Probably a radar chart would be better (like Github's breakdown), but the pie chart was really fast to do in Google Sheets.

Make a data-driven KPR

Instead of "I will complete more tickets this quarter than last quarter," or "I will spend more time on features and less on tech debt," you can put numbers to it. Use this one weird trick to wow your manager.

Become a key contributor to your team

"I've noticed that over half of my stories have been tech debt lately. Should we take a closer look at why we have so much debt and consider a strategy for tackling it/should I be re-prioritizing something?"

Make a personal scoreboard

When I get a little spare time, I'm going to make myself a progress board where I have a fun way to look at last year's record and how close I am to beating it month by month.

Even without an official scoreboard, it felt really good to look at my tickets completed over the past year and look at how much I rocked it some months, when I'd had a couple of tough tickets in a row that slowed me down a lot.

Of course, I'm not limited to using my own data here. I can visualize the data of anyone on my team.

NOTE: Please use this wisely. I beg of you, do not use comparative visualization as a way to undermine your coworkers and make them sad. I can almost guarantee this will backfire on you. At least, it will if you work anywhere that doesn't suck. The ONLY way I would recommend ever including this data in anything public facing is if you know that you are completing WAY more tickets than anyone else, to the point that you are drowning. And even then, I would say something like "For the past 3 months I have completed x percentage of this team's tickets and I am feeling overwhelmed/I need support with this." Don't use it to call out a specific person. It will give you a bad reputation. If an executive or a manager or someone else wants to see this data, they can also see this data.

A fun, private way to use this, however, is to spy on someone you really admire. Check out how many tickets they're putting out (again, remember to include average story points for context). Try to catch them.

In my case, I have a small team and I ended up looking briefly at all of our tickets.