How to best organise work projects to support sprint planning

[Ricky]

Good evening community.

We are currently trying to find a way to best organise our work in Jira to support sprint planning. For example, the business has asked for two projects: one, to deliver a hotel booking system, and two, a desk booking system.

We have tried one Jira project and used a new issue type called an 'Initiative' as the project name. Epics are linked to the initiative via the parent link to show what issues relate to which project. This is because we use multiple epics per initiative to group BA activity, Developer activity, Business Change activity, etc. 

We used one project because we are one development team delivering multiple business outcomes together. Even though they are separate business outcomes, it enables us to maintain the issues in one place. This feeds the Jira Plan, showing the project manager our activity on each project from initiative to sub-task level.

Using this approach we have faced the following problem:

During sprint planning and backlog grooming, you cannot identify which epics are for which business project (initiative). This is because you can only filter by epics and releases on the backlog screen.

Our workaround is clicking on each issue during the exercise to show the initiative project name (the parent link). This is very time-consuming.

The only solutions I can think of to resolve our problem are:

1) Name the project in each epic title. This will enable visibility during sprint planning because the epic displays next to the story. However, I'm not a fan of this idea because people need to remember to add the project name in an epic title, it creates duplication, and epic names will become long.

2) Create a separate Jira project for each business project. In our case, we would have 2 Jira projects. This enables you to know which epics are against each project during planning. However, this would create impossible administration because of an endless list of Jira projects which may only have 20 issues inside. And, a sprint per Jira project with the same developer team, and a board would be needed to group all the work to provide visibility. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Asha Goyal]

Hello @Ricardo 

Few other options are:

Label customization -- Instead of naming the project in each epic title, consider using custom labels to categorize epics by project.

Advanced Roadmaps for cross-project planning -Atlassian's Advanced Roadmaps add-on for Jira allows you to plan across multiple projects on a single roadmaps

Custom fields for project identification - You could create a custom field dedicated to identifying the project each epic belongs to. This field could be mandatory for epics and then used for filtering and reporting.

Kindly accept the ans if this helps.

Thanks

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi @Ricardo ,

It's Mary from Planyway

Regarding the second solution, I may recommend you to try Planyway multiboard view which will allow you to gain visibility across multiple project on the roadmap. Including not just the project level, but the epic level and the team level too.

You just connect all required projects like shown here:

And then group the timeline by project, team, or epic. It'll show you issues of any type, across all connected projects.

At the same time, you can open your Jira backlog/project board on the same page with the roadmap.