How to best manage cross functional projects/initiatives on Jira Standard

[Chris Yeoh]

We are currently setting up Jira scrum projects for various go-to marketing teams, who will be managing their own projects. Can anyone give me guidance on the best way to group work that will impact multiple teams and projects? 

I understand Jira Premium has top-level planning and cross-team planning, which sounds like what I'm looking for, but we are on Jira Standard, so we don't have access to these features. 

I'm thinking of creating a master project with our "big rock" projects and linking those to the stories and tasks in the team projects. 

Would I do this with Epics? Or labels? Is there a better way to do this with the features available in Jira Standard?

Thanks.

[Danut M _StonikByte_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris Yeoh,

I also recommend using Epics. You could create epics in your main project and put under them all the necessary tasks or stories from the other projects (dev, marketing, etc). 

Once you do this, you can then track the overall progress at the Epic level, while each individual team still work on their own tasks/projects that belong to the epics.

You can use Jira's native gadgets or reports to track epics. Or, you can use an app from Atlassian Marketplace that provides advanced capabilities for tracking your epics: epic burndown chart, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), etc. 

Danut.  

[Chris Yeoh]

Thanks @Danut M _StonikByte_ ,

Do I need to create these Epics in a company-managed project to be usable in the sub-projects?

Thanks

Chris.

[Valerie Knapp · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris Yeoh , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your question. 

As you've mentioned, the typical solution to achieve a cross-project hierarchy in Jira standard is with Epics.

I agree a good approach would be to have larger work packages as Epics in a project that then can be proliferated to other projects. I wouldn't recommend using labels but if you use automation for the creation of the other issues, I think you should be fine to copy labels from the Epics to their Stories and Sub-tasks. If you leave it to users to correctly choose and apply the labels, however, there is a lot of room for error. 

I would encourage you to set up a sample project and test some automations and see how you go 

If you have other questions, you can always post here again.

Cheers and good luck!

[Chris Yeoh]

Thanks @Valerie Knapp ,

I'll try creating larger work packages as Epics in a project and see how that works.

Cheers

Chris.