How do you manage priorities when multiple teams use the same Jira project?

[chickpeafilae]

Hi everyone,

 We recently consolidated several teams into a single Jira project for visibility, but now it’s getting hard to keep priorities straight. Some teams feel their tasks should always be top priority, while others have critical bugs that need immediate attention. We’re struggling to find a balance that feels fair and keeps workflows efficient.

For those of you with experience managing multi-team Jira environments, how do you set up processes or rules that help everyone cooperate without stepping on each other’s work? Do you use custom fields, automation rules, boards per team, or something else to maintain clarity and fairness?

[Brant Schroeder]

@chickpeafilae welcome to the Atlassian community

I am assuming that each team has their own work and priorities.  If this is the case separating out the work by boards is a great way to help a team organize their work.   This would not require any additional changes like custom fields, automation, or anything else.  You can use the JQL to filter the issues for each team.  I would suggest looking at using components to help identify the issues if there is not a way to already do that. 

[housfilae]

 You can use the JQL to filter the issues for each team.

[chickpeafilae]

Okay

[chickpeafilae]

Thank you all for your valueable inputs. 

[Brant Schroeder]

@chickpeafilae you are welcome.

[Laura Marin - Millarum]

I've dealt with this in my previous 4 jobs, the problem is that Teams and the organizations itself want to keep handling this from a Project Management perspective, however when work for each Team is a project on it's own then you're leading with Program Management. In a program, the key is to have the right visibility at the right level, meaning that you'll not need the regular Project view and what you need is dependencies visibility and how all of them affect the bigger "Project" that in reality is the Program, also called Portfolio or System level.

I've fixed it in 2 ways depending on where I was. The easiest was to bring the Program needs at an Epic level, so on the Story level anyone can plan their own work and you just needed visibility on what is dependent on what. It can be translated to Initiative level for Program needs.

But I've encountered several Teams that don't care about other Teams and they want to keep using Epic or Initiatives for their own needs. In this cases I always ended creating the Portfolio project in Jira where the needs are planned and worked here, and the dependencies are tracked and pulled from the other project/s, so the easiest way was to define a checklist on the Portfolio need and mention work items from the other projects where each dependency of the Program is fulfilled. Jira is great because it shows the status of a work item right in the description of another one if added there.

On a side comment, we build a view for the Program view when splitting work within a Project, or when needing to see the progress of different projects in a single view in case you want to give it a look.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/3230195340/millarum-roadmap