Contract staff management system with Jira

Following on from our previous blogpost on how Atlassian's Jira can be used to manage business processes that require collaboration, reporting and structured management, we have another example.

This time, it is a custom workflow and configuration for a temp agency. They supply large companies with temporary workers - mostly seasonal when there is a lot of extra work to do. This was a digital transformation project from manual processes to a cloud-based automated system.

Problem

There are two key business problems that need solving:

• New employees must be registered legally, and correctly. Various pieces of information and documents must be in place, before they start work, such as a signed contract, proof of ID, bank account etc. If this is not done, there is a risk of breaking the law, or if a employee causes damage to property for example, the absence of a contract will cause a lot of problems.
• A very high volume of staff means that this is impractical and unreliable to do manually.

At this point, the temp agency, had not necessarily settled on Jira - they just wanted a simple, reliable, and inexpensive system, that could grow with their requirements.

Criteria

Their criteria were:

Easy to use

• It must be possible to find employees quickly by specified parameters

Mobile access

• Mobile dashboards or filters were required.

Notifications

• Get mail from system about due dates/overdue actions

There were three main competitors:

• Jira
• A CRM System
• Self-Developed Software

Solution

Ultimately, they chose Jira. Jira comes with permissions, structured data capture, workflows, alerts and configurable reporting all out of the box. Developing all this would take a long time. Of course, it is possible to start with a very simple custom system - but then requirements grow, and you suddenly find that your "simple custom system" has evolved into a large, unsupported, custom piece of software, that is consuming employee time, and therefore a lot of money.

• Create a custom Jira issue type to represent an employee
• Custom parameters so that business information can be captured and reported on
• Automatic due dates and notifications based on contract date to ensure that people are always employed legally
• Easy to find employees without contracts or with expired dates
• Easy to find staff reapplying for work, so their previous record can be viewed

An Employee

Dashboards to report employee statuses

These are simply using included widgets to provide real time information about the thousands of employees flowing through the system. Much easier than writing custom reports for bespoke software!

Results

Much greater visibility for management staff

• Custom filters and dashboard for managers
• Custom dashboard for executives

Mobile access

• JIRA Web or Android/iPhone applications

Automated notifications to ensure that all staff are working legally

• Managers are told when various work items are due, to provide sufficient notice to rectify problems
• Executives have reports with all items that are now overdue

Jira is not just for technical teams!

JIRA is a good fit for a number of problems which require automation, collaboration, workflows, reporting and structured information. It fits in well to many digital transformation projects.

If you are undergoing digital transformation, or just want some assistance in automating your business processes, please get in contact.