It’s not just dev teams who use Colored Label Manager for Jira. Health and wellness retailers provider H&B proving that business teams can use our label management tool just as capably, and get just as much value out of it.
Holland & Barrett International Limited, trading as Holland & Barrett (H&B), is a British-based multinational chain of health food shops with over 1,300 stores in 16 countries, including a substantial presence in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Holland & Barrett International Limited widens access to Health and Wellness Retailers through a powerful suite of solutions, which they manage using Jira. Their software spans the entire retail lifecycle, from identifying new products to evaluating the market for existing products to developing marketing strategies for products and reporting. Already massive fans of Jira labels, Holland & Barrett International Limited became one of Atlassway customers back in 2024.
Holland & Barrett International Limited dev teams were the first at the company to use Colored Label Manager for Jira for their Jira projects. Each of these teams has their own Jira project and they use labels for showcasing ticket volumes and version releases in detail, so that if any of the dev managers come by, they’ll have an immediate sense of what’s going on.
But the love for Colored Label Manager at H&B has been spreading way beyond the dev team…
The entire operations division now uses Colored Label Manager
H&B dev teams are agile teams who work in Scrum. But the operations division is made up of teams that are, according to Jacob, H&B Atlassian Administrator and Agile Lead, “transitioning to agile, and currently use a mix of Scrum and other methodologies”. And yet, he says that all the ops teams are using Colored Label Manager
This means, of course, that they’re all using Jira. Even though, historically, Atlassian have struggled to persuade the world that Jira is no longer just for software development (not helped by things like Jira Core and team-managed projects), their mission’s been a resounding success over at H&B.
Why labels are useful “Says Jacob”
Jacob explains that the spread of Colored Label Manager for Jira across H&B has happened totally organically.
“I started using it straight away,” he says. “Then the defect manager came to me and said, ‘Ooo, can you show me?’ Then the risk team did the same. Now the dev teams, ops teams, business intelligence (BI) team, and most recently, our service desk team, are all using it. But we haven’t forced Colored Label Manager on anyone. People have seen it and been drawn to it. They’re using it because they want to. The growth has been very natural.”
Each project Manager create their desired label fields and manage them with the team.
I have created many label fields and used them in my project , for example Definition of Done , Project Phases and Acceptance criteria , all other dev teams added these fields to their projects and they are managing them according to their needs.
The BI team use Colored Label Manager to look at which countries are submitting the most and least tickets. We’re a global company and we get requests from many countries.
Meanwhile, the internal IT service desk team, who use Jira Service Management, are using are using ticket data, such as created vs resolved bugs within a week based on labels using JQL filters in each Gadget on the Dashboard to track how well they’re doing. Jacob says, “They have various different pie charts on their dashboards, but the reports provided by Colored Label Manager are particularly helpful. This will undoubtedly help us create simple but powerful classification and search tools for your projects.”
And yes, Now we know how to use labels in Jira the right way.
We should make this man our publicist. 🙂
