JIRA project models going from platform-centric to feature-centric

[Andrew Custer]

Hi, 

I am charged with two initiatives that will probably require me to change our JIRA config to accommodate. 

1. We have our 2021 Engineering Roadmap in a spreadsheet with about 220 distinct initiatives, all prioritized with P0 and P1's scoped in weeks. We are going to convert all of these into JIRA tickets (currently undecided which will be Epics and which will be Stories).
2. We are moving from development model where we have Web, iOS, Backend, Core Services, Data, etc. teams, each with it's own JIRA project. 

I would be interested in hearing how others who have experienced the above, or theoretical, would design their JIRA instance. For #1, I was leaning towards creating a project named Roadmap, put all the Roadmap items in it and use that as a central backlog, moving the tickets to the appropriate team when development begins. Thoughts??

For #2, this feels more daunting and could be susceptible to over-configuring. I do need to get more clarity from the CTO on what the actual team structure will be. We are online retail. What I am worried is that if you break our feature set into functionally atomic pieces, we could have 20-25 areas and thus 20-25 different projects (Home page, promotional logic and functionality, Product List pages, Product Detail pages, Profile, Checkout, Product array and synchronization, and on and on). We are not a large company and potentially having 1-2 projects for each of our Eng headcount seems ludicrous. :)

My gut is to go ahead with my proposal for #1, and not change for #2 until we find our config to be broken, but have a couple of models ready to go in case we need to make changes rapidly. 

Thoughts?

[Stuart Capel - London]

Hi Andrew,

I would advise looking into Advanced Roadmaps. It allows you to have levels of hierarchy above Epics and manage multiple views of your issues. It means teams can work at the project level as they're used to, but you can track progress at a higher strategic level. 

I've been using it for a while now and it's really changed the way I manage my projects and multi-project dependencies.

It's available as part of Data Centre subscriptions now but on Cloud it's only available as part of the Premium subscription and there is a price jump I'm afraid, but I'd still recommend it.