Michael King, CTO of Halfaker and Associates, gave a presentation on using Jira to scale a business. He discussed how Halfaker grew and struggled with consistency and risk management across many projects. To address this, Halfaker implemented Jira to define processes, align teams, and manage projects. The presentation covered creating a business architecture, designing process management in Jira, and key Jira concepts like projects, tickets, workflows, boards, dashboards and reporting.

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NAME: Michael King
TITLE: Chief Technology Officer
ORGANIZATION: Halfaker and Associates
USING JIRA TO
SCALE YOUR
BUSINESS

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• Company founded in 2006 with the vision
of Continuing to Serve…
• Founded by West Point graduate and
Army Military Police Officer Dawn Halfaker
(Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned,
Woman-Owned, 8(a) Small Business)
• 200+ employee company focused on
providing Data Analytics, Software
Engineering, IT Infrastructure, and Cyber
Security solutions to Federal Government
customers
• Halfaker serves VA, DoD, HHS, DHS, USDA,
and Transportation
ABOUT HALFAKER
Culture built on Military Principles
 Lead from the Front
 Never Give Up
 Plan, Plan, Plan
 Take Care of Your People
 Know the Job above you and below
you
 Demand Excellence

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AGENDA
• About Halfaker
• Create an Enterprise Business Architecture
• Designing your Process Management System
• Introduction to JIRA
• JIRA Projects
• JIRA Ticket Types
• JIRA Ticket Workflows
• JIRA Boards
• JIRA Dashboards
• JIRA Reporting
• Questions?

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• Halfaker began to accelerate in growth in 2013,
approaching 100 employees spread across 20 projects
• As the Company grew, we struggled to maintain
consistency, ensure quality, and manage risk across
the increasing number of projects spread across the
country
• To provide excellent service, we relied on a few heroes
who were constantly reacting to emergencies,
swarming issues like 5-year-olds playing soccer
BUSINESS CHALLENGE

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• Halfaker needed to invest in processes and tools that support them, in order
to scale from a small business to a sustainable mid-tier organization:
 Codify how we ensured every customer would receive excellent,
innovative results
 Align people, systems, and processes to strategic goals
CREATE AN ENTERPRISE BUSINESS
ARCHITECTURE
Strategic Goals
Business Processes
Templates and Forms
Business Systems
(Applications)
Guidelines and Policies
Organization
Structure

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DEFINE BUSINESS SYSTEMS APPROACH
Document Management
e.g. SharePoint
Managing your organization’s
documents should be your
initial focus – tools like Dropbox
offer convenient collaboration,
while tools like SharePoint
provide additional version,
configuration, and permissions
control options.
Process Management
e.g. JIRA
The next level above managing
documents is moving processes, and
the associated tasks, requirements,
etc. into a tool and out places where
collaboration and reporting is hard –
like sticky notes, Excel spreadsheets,
emails, and your head. Agile tools like
JIRA, CRM/Case Management tools like
Salesforce, and Domain-specific tools
like Applicant Tracking Systems and
Human Resource systems provide this
functionality.
Knowledge Management
e.g. Confluence
Managing your organization’s
knowledge is providing more than a
place to store documents – it is
providing a convenient place for
employees to collaborate, in addition
to conference rooms and email, will
provide a significant ROI – chat-
based tools like Slack or HipChat fill
some of this need, but a wiki
platform like Confluence provides a
more asynchronous knowledge
platform.
Workflow
Management
e.g. SharePoint Forms
While process management
tools can track approvals and
workflows, there can be a
significant increase in value
from a general task-tracking
tool (e.g. JIRA) to a more
opinionated system with
more detailed business logic
and form interfaces (e.g.
Applicant Tracking System,
BD CRM, Travel Management)
Strategic Goals
Business
Processes
Templates and
Forms
Business
Systems
(Applications)
Guidelines and
Policies
Org. Chart

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BUSINESS SYSTEMS
RECOMMENDATIONS
• Deploy enterprise tools that are useful and intuitive to prevent fragmented, shadow IT solutions from
popping up
• Organize around a consistent structure and naming scheme
• Think about Permissions and Configuration Management
• Provide Content Governance through Site Templates
Traditional,
top-down,
prescriptive
management
Agile, self-
organizing
teamsIntentionally pick where your
organization is on this
spectrum
Opinionated vs. Self-Organizing Spectrum

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DESIGNING YOUR PROCESS
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
1. Select a Process Management Tool that aligns with your organization’s business model and culture
2. Invest in an enterprise platform to provide a consistent platform for your organization to build and
improve processes on
3. Build a backlog of processes to “attack”, moving from email, sticky notes, and conversations into a
formalized tool
4. Prioritize the highest value processes – you can spend a lot of energy building processes that aren’t
high-value
5. Think about how you’ll organize teams/projects into the system – this high-level governance will be
critical as you grow
Note: We selected JIRA over similar products because it is so flexible, enabling us to configure our
approach to each type of project with a few different configurations for a variety of types of projects
(e.g. Data Mining, Software Engineering, Cyber Security, and Back-office departments like HR or Finance) –
some organizations prefer more opinionated tools

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DESIGNING YOUR PROCESSES
1. Don’t “bite off more than you can chew” – focus on a short list of teams or departments
initially, to gain momentum and gather lessons learned
2. Focus on building an enterprise platform with reusable components, instead of “over-
fitting” solutions to specific teams
3. Consider long-term concepts like how you’ll do enterprise-wide analysis and reporting
with various data in a process management system (e.g. Will all of your teams use
“Deliverable” or “Risk” tickets the same way?)
4. Consider both your most experienced and most junior team members when designing
processes
5. Get as much information into structured data, so it’s easier to analyze later (e.g. Create a
specific data type for “Lessons Learned” instead of hiding it inside of other data types like
“Note” or “Task”)

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INTRODUCTION TO JIRA
PROJECT
JIRA is organized, at the highest level, into projects which can be used
for departments, projects, or sub-project teams. Each project has a
Project site where team members can collaborate.
TICKET
Tickets, also referred to ask
Issues, are the building blocks
of JIRA – each Ticket Type has
an icon and associated
workflow.
TICKET WORKFLOW
Each ticket type has a workflow
that defines the stages that
ticket goes through (e.g. “To Do”,
“In Progress”, and “Done”) and
who can move tickets through
stages.
BOARDS
JIRA provides
various Agile
boards that teams
can use to manage
their work, using
either a Scrum or
Kanban approach
DASHBOARDS
JIRA lets users
create and
configure their
own dashboards
to visualize
important
information
easily
REPORTING
JIRA provides a
variety of reports
such as Burndown,
Velocity Chart,
Control Chart, and
Cumulative Flow
Diagram
PROJECT

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JIRA PROJECTS
• Projects are the foundation of JIRA:
• Tickets are located inside one JIRA project
• Boards may include all JIRA projects in this JIRA environment
• Reports may include all JIRA projects in this JIRA environment
• Separate departments and projects should each have their own JIRA Project
• Complex programs can use a single JIRA Project, with multiple boards to organize work; or
use separate JIRA Projects – a consolidated JIRA Project is recommended to help with
program-wide planning, monitoring, and analysis

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JIRA TICKET TYPES
• When creating a ticket, select Project
and then Ticket Type (Issue Type)
• Each ticket type in JIRA includes:
• Required fields (shown with a red
asterisk)
• Optional fields (without an
asterisk)
• Workflow (see next slide)
• The form to create or edit a ticket can
be configured as desired

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CASE STUDY: PROJECT MANAGEMENT TICKET TYPES
• JIRA Ticket Types can be used
to define a wide variety of
work
• The table on the right shows
tickets you could use to
support project management
activities
• You could create tickets to
manage other domains, such
as Procurement or
Accounting
Issue Type
Where is the
JIRA Ticket
Created
Who Is Responsible for
Resolving JIRA Tickets?
1. Contract Deliverable
Compliance
JIRA site
Project Manager
2. Contract Milestone
3. Contract Performance Metric
4. Contract Requirement
5. Peer Review
Project’s JIRA
site
6. Configuration Audit
7. Risk
8. Issue
9. Customer Complaint
10. Meeting Action Item
11. Customer Compliment (Kudos)
N/A (No Workflow)12. Success Story (Proof Point)
13. Lessons Learned
14. Process Improvement
Process
Improvement
Team’s JIRA
site
Process Improvement
Team

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JIRA TICKET WORKFLOWS
• Workflows can be used to track
progress of work (showing which
work has been started)
• Workflows can also be used to clarify
handoff points between people or
teams (e.g. “Ready for Review”)
• Workflows can be customized by
ticket type and tailored by project if
desired
• It is recommended to keep
workflows consistent across your
organization as much as possible

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CASE STUDY: CUSTOM WORKFLOWS
• Workflows can be used to create
queues for work to be pulled from,
based on Kanban best practices (e.g.
handoff point for an approval review)
• In this example, a workflow phase is
added to require the Quality
Manager to review and approve,
using the “Ready for QM Review”
phase (Permissions are set, so only
authorized users can move tickets
from ‘Ready for QM Review’ to
“Closed’)

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CASE STUDY: CUSTOM WORKFLOWS
• In this example,
workflow phases
are used to track
a sequential
process, where
departments can
pull work as it is
ready for them

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JIRA BOARDS: KANBAN BOARD

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JIRA BOARDS: SCRUM BOARD (ACTIVE)

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JIRA BOARDS: SCRUM BOARD (BACKLOG)

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JIRA DASHBOARDS: GADGETS
• Dashboards are a powerful way to bring your
most common JIRA questions into one home
page
• There are 43 different types of gadgets (widgets)
you can add to your dashboard
• Dashboards can be shared across your team to
help show people how best to use JIRA

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JIRA REPORTING: BURNDOWN

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JIRA REPORTING: VELOCITY

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QUESTIONS?
• Follow-up Questions? Want to Connect?
• Michael King, PMI-ACP, SAFe SA, PMP
• michael.king@halfaker.com
• @mikehking (Twitter)
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehking