Let’s be honest… neither company is introducing only new initiatives, and their backlog consists solely of innovative tasks. We often manage repetitive tasks or activities such as product upgrades, release processes, identical product implementations for various clients, and many other familiar activities within your business area.

While the work might be stimulating for a team, preparing the backlog can be a nightmare. It involves clicking multiple ‘Create’ buttons in Jira, copy-pasting identical texts from previous tasks or an Excel file, and making adjustments to fit the current iteration.

When facing this challenge in a project, it’s valuable to create templates that can be easily reused whenever repetitive activities arise. What’s the idea behind creating these templates? There are two possibilities: 

• The first involves creating an Epic with child issues and sub-tasks encompassing all generic required activities. 
• The second option is to create any issue with linked and sub-tasks and consider them all template issues. 

It’s important to designate all template issues as such and exclude them from filters that display the current backlog. This prevents situations where they are mistakenly counted as actual backlog issues. 

What’s next after creating templates? Jira doesn’t offer the option to clone tasks with links, and the editing capabilities before cloning are limited. To clone templates, consider using one of the following Jira plugins:

• Template (Epic) Cloner for Jira is a robust app that supports bulk cloning of Epics with child issues and sub-tasks.
• Advanced Template Cloner for Jira is a powerful app that allows the replication of main issues, linked issues, and sub-tasks. 

Benefits of having templates created: 

• Consistent Procedures: Teams will consistently follow the same procedures, ensuring efficiency and cohesion.
• Confidence in Task Awareness: Team members will have confidence in their awareness of necessary tasks, reducing the risk of oversight or miscommunication.
• Well-Defined Backlog: Well-defined backlogs provide clarity and organization, facilitating smoother project execution.
• Improved Planning: Templates contribute to improved and quicker planning processes, allowing teams to allocate resources more effectively and meet deadlines efficiently.
• Enhanced Focus: Teams will be able to focus on their core work rather than spending time on manual issue creation in the backlog, leading to increased productivity and innovation.