Feature Overview

App configuration

Skill Administration

Managing skills is the foundation of competence-driven work.

This admin panel tab allows power users to define the organization’s competences in the form of a skill hierarchy. The users can freely define and structure the skills. These skills will then be available for assignment to users and issues.

Open

Sample skill configuration

Open	Leaf item. These are the skills made available in the dropdown components in Human Capital and Issue Skills.
	Branch; groups the leaf items together. Not available for direct use in Human Capital and Issue Skills.
	Expanded/collapsed indicator; applicable to branches.
	Remove node; visible on hover over an item.
	Adds a child item; visible on hover over an item.
	New item placeholder; allows entering a new item on the level in the tree on which it is rendered.

Once created, leaves and branches can be moved around in the structure with drag-and-drop.

The interface saves the configuration of the items in the tree instantly on every edit; no explicit submission of the competence tree is required by the user.

Human Capital

Human capital allows linking the skills which you earlier defined to particular users. The individual user skills are matched with the ones assigned to issues in queues when a user pulls new work from a queue.

You add skills held by starting to type its name in the field or looking it up in the dropdown list and picking the desired value. Skills can be easily removed by using backspace in the input field containing the skill and deleting the desired option or by clicking the x on it.

For users in the process of training a skill, similarly, add the desired skills to the right column. (Training). A single skill for a given user can only be set either as held or learning at a time.

Work Queues

Work queues configure how users can pull work by competence and self-manage their workloads through a consistent work-routing strategy rather than having issues manually assigned to them or cherry-picking issues they prefer to work on.

The configuration consists of three major sections:

Master routing strategy

The master routing strategy is responsible for determining how a new task is pulled from the list of queues to which a user is subscribed. There are three strategies available:

1. Queue order - picks work in the order of queues listed. The system will pick the first matching task by checking active queues from top to the bottom of the queue stack.

2. Top priority - picks the top priority issue from any of the active queues. The system will check the first issues across queues and pick the one with top priority.

3. Weighted round-robin - distributes workload randomly across queues Set weights to adjust the desired queue affinities when pulling work.

Settings

Allowing to limit the work in progress - the maximum number of unresolved issues that a user can have assigned at a time. If a user hits the limit, the algorithm will not return any new issues until the number of unresolved ones depletes below this value.

Queue stack

Allows to define and configure the queues from which the new issues are pulled by users. The configuration can have an unlimited number of queues.

A new queue is added by clicking the “Add a new queue” button. Once created, it needs to be configured to become operational.

The configuration of an individual queue consists of the following parameters:

1. JQL Filter - the JQL FIlter used to define the queue. Pick a publicly available filter to define queue criteria.

2. Users and groups

3. Skills settings:

   1. Ignore matching by skills - filter criteria alone will be used for the queue; queue items will not be checked for skill alignment with the pulling user’s skills.

   2. Allow picking tasks marked for training - when toggled, it will fetch queue items based on the match between a user’s Training skills and the issue’s skills if that issue is also enabled for training.

Depending on the chosen queue distribution strategy, different queue metadata is available.

In the case of Queue order strategy, the stack items get annotated with the order information on the left side of the stack. For Weighted round-robin, an input is presented where you can update the relative weight of a queue when picking tasks.

App operations

This section discusses app usage in day-to-day operations.

Issue skills

To leverage skill-based work management, issues need to be mapped to skills.

The section is available in Issue Details of the standard Jira issue screen:

The form configures competence requirements for issues and toggles training assignment of issues to users.

Once set, pulling work will take the skill requirements for consideration.

Pull work by competence

The pull work widget is the heart of the competence-based pull work system. It enables users to pull work items based on user skills and Work Queues configuration discussed in the points above.

You need to create a Jira Dashboard and add “Pull work by competence” to it to use it.