There are some exceptions which allows you to opt-out of providing metadata without having to be on an Enterprise license. Tucked away deep in the FAQs it tells you certain organisations have the right to be excluded to meet their compliance requirements, ie. customers on: 1) Customer-managed-keys (CMK) or bring-your-own-key (BYOK) 2) Atlassian Government Cloud 3) Atlassian Isolated Cloud 4) "organizations with HIPAA compliance or from other certain government and financial services customers". This isn't automatic, so you'll need to request to be excluded. We're on a Premium license (not Enterprise) and I raised a support ticket with Atlassian to successfully request our org is excluded from the metadata collection as we fell in to one of the above categories. We'll manually disable the app-data collection also.

We try to avoid using a separate "blocked" status in the workflow for this kind of scenario if at all possible. This is to avoid the work item being "parked" and potentially also re-assigned which could lead to some team members thinking the blockage is someone else's problem to solve. Instead we use the flag feature so that the work item remains as it is so that the assignee/team retain ownership and take responsibility for whatever actions are needed to clear the impediment so they can progress with the delivery. As the flag on a work item is not always easy to spot or available in some views, we also use automation to add a visual indicator to the Summary field (eg. a no-entry icon ⛔) when a flag is added to the work item.

@Denise Ellis Hi - yes, I think changing the priority and/or setting the impediment flag works if you need to isolate the blocker items in board swimlanes or to pull them back via JQLs. If you want them to standout visually in boards, then using automation to add a graphic/emoji as a prefix to the Summary is easy to do, or you could perhaps even use the new feature in Jira to add a "cover" to cards on the board to colourise them or even have a graphical background so they stand out from the other cards.

Hi Wendy, What is it you want to achieve? For example, (1) do you want separate work items (eg. sub-tasks) so that you can split out the work done by the different teams involved in the process? Or (2) do you want to capture metrics on things like "flow efficiency" so that you can see how much time is spent doing work and how much time is spent waiting - this kind of data can be used with senior management to help drive process changes when you can see where the delays are coming from. If (1) then I think your use of sub-tasks is the way to go. If (2) then your workflow status names already have the foundations to start collecting metrics to determine your flow efficiency, eg. Active States - In Progress - In Review - In QA - In UAT Waiting States - Backlog - To Do - Ready for QA - Ready for UAT - Ready for Prod If you have add-ons like Custom Charts it can generate the metrics for you easily. If you don't, then you could do it via Jira automations - although some set-up is needed! Once you have the data, it should help to show where your biggest hold-ups are to help start conversations about what process and/or Jira config changes could help to reduce the waiting. Similarly, you can bring in Cycle Time and Lead Time in to the same data set to get an indication of how much time your build/dev efforts are taking (cycle time) compared to how much time to get the change shipped to the customer (lead time). I suspect your lead times are excessive compared to your cycle times - that kind of data can help drive conversations about changes are needed to reduce the time to ship product to customers. Overall, I think there's only so much Jira can do for you - it sounds more like changes to your resourcing and/or process are needed, but the data from Jira may help drive that. For example, if your delays are from waiting for your QA cycles to complete, can you change your process to ship as a "beta" release to selected customers in production who do the testing for you? Atlassian do it all the time - but don't get me started on what I think about that! :)

Hi - have you looked at the out-of-the-box reports on your premium plan? They're not the best, but they're free! - Velocity report - Burnup report - Sprint burndown chart - Cumulative flow diagram - Cycle Time Report - Deployment Frequency Report The newish Summary view on Jira boards has some useful data widgets for high-level reporting, but you can't customise much in them unfortunately. You'll also be able to do a certain level of reporting with Jira dashboards without using any add-ons like Custom Charts - but you will get to a brick wall at some point depending on how complex your reporting is! You can also have your Jira data pulled into Excel/Google sheets via real-time links, and once you've got your data in them then you'll have the full capability of Excel/Google to manipulate and chart your Jira data - all at no additional cost.