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Companies have many recurring processes that require careful and meticulous attention to detail. The Fin team needs to follow certain steps during payroll to meet compliance regulations. Support agents must gather relevant information regarding every issue that is submitted by the client. IT has various security, privacy, and data residency concerns to consider before relying on a vendor for infrastructure support.
But how can you ensure that these processes are set in stone? And how can adherence to them be proven during a Jira audit?
The challenge of maintaining consistency in recurring processes
A simple checklist is one of the most efficient solutions for ensuring consistency across one’s tasks. It’s much harder to miss something important when you are following a clear ToDo list.
Still, most of the recurring processes that are required to run projects successfully are complex enough to demand multiple Jira issue templates – each with individual subtasks and checklists.
And even then, simply having something in Jira doesn’t necessarily mean the process is set in stone. Teams can change and adapt their workflows. It’s only natural that some of your task descriptions and ToDo’s are dynamically shifting as your business grows.
- But what if there’s a process that does not allow even the slightest change?
- What if you are compelled to do certain tasks regularly and in an orderly fashion by a regulator?
- What if your regulated process evolves, and you need to make some centralized changes?
- And how can you make sure that the regulator is satisfied after auditing your Jira instance?
Enter Linked Templates in Smart Checklist for Jira.
What are Linked Templates in Smart Checklist for Jira.Pro?
Linked Templates are a special kind of checklist template that is available to Smart Checklist Pro users. They allow businesses to clearly define certain specific processes. The option for making tweaks is still there, but you’ll need to be an admin to make changes.
The decision maker (Manager, Project, or Product owner) can set these templates up once, and they will then be reused automatically for every issue that meets specific conditions.
What makes Linked Templates different from any other checklist template?
- Live Connection: Linked Templates stay connected to associated issues, ensuring instant updates and synchronization.
- Immutability: Users can’t make changes in the imported Linked Templates other than changing the status of checklist items.
- Synchronized updates: Admins can update the original template, automatically reflecting changes across all checklists where the template is imported.
What are the key benefits of using Linked Templates in Jira?
The main appeal of a Linked Template is its immutability. An important process that you’ve set up once will remain unchanged. At the same time, the team will still have detailed steps and ToDos for their issues.
That said, change is a natural occurrence in every growing business. Your processes are continuously being polished and perfected. However, making changes in every issue that has a template applied to it one by one is rather troublesome and extremely time-consuming.
This is why the Linked Templates feature allows you to apply the changes you’ve made in a template to every issue where it is used.
How can Linked Templates help with a Jira audit?
We follow a certain philosophy when it comes to the development of our products. Our teams tend to build the features if we can validate their usefulness. The Smart Checklist app itself was born from an internal need.
For example, Linked Templates can be quite beneficial when it comes to undergoing a Jia audit for a specific security compliance certification. These kinds of certifications often require such activities as:
- Regular Access Control: Used to ensure that access to sensitive systems, data, and resources is properly managed and controlled. The checklist may include items such as user access reviews, privilege escalation checks, and monitoring access logs.
- Security Awareness Training: Tracks employee training and awareness activities related to cybersecurity. It includes items such as scheduled training sessions, completion status of training modules, employee acknowledgment of security policies, and periodic phishing simulation exercises.
Having a checklist is a good solution for these and similar scenarios. Simply document the processes as checklist templates and then regularly import them via automation.
Linked Templates offer an added benefit as they ensure that the processes are strictly followed.
- Linked templates ensure that the process you have documented stays consistent in every Jira issue. The templates are immutable and locked.
- If any changes are necessary for the process to be more effective – you can automatically update them across all issues the template is linked to.
- Every time a template is used, the action is logged. Any change to a linked template is logged as well. These logs can be reviewed during an audit.
As a result, we didn’t just improve an internal process to be compliant. We have also generated the necessary logs that can be reviewed by the auditor as proof of compliance.
Would you like to know more about how Smart Checklist can help improve your processes? Then try it for free today.
