How to incorporate stories in Jira that are done by external teams not using Agile/Jira?

[Frank Trujillo]

I have a team, of let's say 5 people.  We have work that we define to solve an epic.  In this case, we'll use data centers.  We want to install network monitoring software in all North American data centers, get the metrics from this monitoring into our data warehouse, and then generate the necessary reports to take action upon.  We will drive selecting the network monitoring software, and generating the reports but we'll require the data center operations folks to install the network monitoring software and then another set of consultants to integrate the data into our data warehouse (we will define the schema and Web Services integration for doing so).  

So in order to make this all happen, we need a story, or multiple stories, related to:  (1) Install Network Monitoring Software at DC1; (2) Pump Network Monitoring Metrics in DC1 into the Data Warehouse; (3) Install Network Monitoring Software at DC2; (4) Pump Network Monitoring Metrics in DC2 into the Data Warehouse.  

The folks needing to perform the work associated with stories 1-4 are not agile, don't know what agile even means, and have different priorities that we do.  So the best we can do is try to get an initial commitment on when the work will be completed.  We don't have any idea on the amount of work, so we can't roll that up into story points that would reflect how done we are with the epic.  

I was thinking of treating these as a new issue type - External Story - and basically looking at Internal Stories and their roll up differently than the completion of external stories.  It may happen, in some cases, we may require work from another team that does use Jira but they have to intake our External Story or maybe we can not have an External Story but link to their Story that contains the work we need.  Or we can treat just as an External Dependency as well.  

Planning to use the regular scrum Jira project (not sure if this has roadmap), but once we have dates, this could be could to predict an overall timeline for the project.  

Looking for thoughts and recommendations here. 

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Frank,

Welcome to Atlassian community!

I understand that you would like to add in your JIRA projects the logged work and details of external teams, which might not have a specific estimation of work defined but should also be also considered in the whole tracking of your team internal progress, but both following different rollups and targets. Is it correct?

I think that use a new issue type would be a good practice to identify/differentiate both teams in your projects, where you will be able to create separate boards and filters to track those in case you need it.

Additionally, I have the following recommendations:

1 - You can link your internal issues with the external issues, in situations where any kind of dependency exists between them.

E.g: The creation of a new user in Jira depends on the creation of the user in the Active Directory, which is accomplished by the external team. Both issues can be linked and the internal one can be put on hold, so you can clearly know where is the whole request being tracked right now and which team is responsible for it.

2 - Only JIRA Users can access JIRA application to log work in any issues. That being said, if you want your external users to easily log work in the external issues of your JIRA project, you can create generic users for each external teams and restrict them to their related project issues by using security issue levels. This approach will let the external users to proactively give an initial commitment on when the work will be completed and how they are progressing in their activities.

Let me know if it makes sense and if you have any questions.