How do I manage multiple priority lists within a single team?

[Andrew Martin]

I have a job where I am managing the workstack of a team of people who are split across five units of work. Each unit has their own list of requirements. I need to prioritise these with the business across all five units to create a single, consolidated list of requirements the team can work on (probably in a Kanban structure).

I could add all the requirements to a single project on Jira, prioritise it, then the team could pick up the reqs and work on them. Of course, when new requirements come in from the units, this becomes very messy in a single project.

Something I've read about on these forums a lot is the idea of having multiple Jira projects (e.g. one for each unit), but then consolidating them in a single board. This would allow me to have a single view of all the in progress, to do and done items the team are or have been working on.

But can I check - how is priority management done in this model? Or to put it another way, is there any intelligent way I can allow five separate units to prioritise just their Jira requirements, then somehow master the requirements across these five units into a single list using this model?

I can't be the first person trying to do this - what is best practice here?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

There are different ways to do this but I would likely do the following:

1. 5 projects and allow each team to manage their own work
2. create a Kanban or Scrum board to display all work that is selected for dev or active sprint
3. use swimlanes based upon teams, I.e. use queries. Enable ranking so the individual teams could rank within their swimlane

[Andrew Martin]

Hi Jack,

I set up some test projects today to play around with this. I've got the projects in place and a consolidated Kanban board showing everything.

If I make changes to the consolidated board, they reflect on the individual project board which is great. But if I make changes on the individual project boards, it messes up the order of the consolidated board.

For example, if I have my issues like this on the consolidated board:

• Project 1 Issue 1
• Project 1 Issue 3
• Project 2 Issue 3
• Project 2 Issue 2
• Project 2 Issue 1
• Project 1 Issue 2

And I decide to elevate Project 1 Issue 2 above Project 1 Issue 3 on the Project 1 board, it will make the following change to the consolidated board:

• Project 1 Issue 1
• Project 1 Issue 2
• Project 1 Issue 3
• Project 2 Issue 3
• Project 2 Issue 2
• Project 2 Issue 1

That doesn't really seem right to me. I assume this is because I'm not using the Swimlane / query / ranking functionality you mention above. I'm not entirely sure how to do this. Could you elaborate in a little more detail?

[Andrew Martin]

Further to this, I've now created some swimlanes for projects. These allow me to rank within an individual project - but I now can't do my master prioritisation? Everything is only ranked in its swimlane. What are my next steps here?

[Jack Brickey]

ranking isn't unique to a board it is unique to a project as issues belong to projects not boards. This is why the order changes. I'm not sure you can accomplish what you are trying to do TBH. That said my UCs for ranking are not complex and as such I'm no expert in this area. You might look at these addons to see if they provide desired capabilities.