Multiple projects, multiple products, shared resources, and multiple boards?

[Tatsiana Gomolko]

Hi,

We’re trying to figure out the best way to organize planning and visibility across a growing number of products and teams in Jira. (Probably been answered quite a few times, but still.)

Atm, we have around 15ish products managed across different teams. Some products are independent, while others share functionality and have dependencies between them. Understandably, as things scale in our team, it’s getting harder to answer some basic questions, like: What is everyone working on across all products and teams? Or do we have enough capacity to take on new work? Or where are the dependencies? And is there a way to make delivery status updates less manual than they are now? I think you get the gist :)

Bottom line, we’d like to keep Jira as the source of truth for execution, but somehow make it a more convenient setup for working across projects, managing shared resources, tracking effort, and getting a bigger-picture view of delivery.

What setup would you recommend for a team operating at this scale?

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi Tatsiana,


You can keep Jira as your source of truth and use Planyway to get a cross-project view. With Planyway, you can connect multiple Jira projects, view all work in one place using Timeline, Table, or Calendar views, track dependencies, monitor workload across teams, and get a high-level delivery overview without moving issues out of Jira.

Our Table view is useful when you need a structured, spreadsheet-like overview of work across multiple projects. It allows you to review Jira issues with important details such as status, assignee, dates, estimates, and other fields in a single view. You can quickly scan large amounts of work, filter what matters, and manage portfolio-level planning while keeping all updates synced back to Jira.

Hope it helps :)

[Tatsiana Gomolko]

Hi Mary,

Thank you for the recommendation, seems like a nice fit. Will try it out.

[Gabriela]

Standard covers three of your four. Worth knowing which one it doesn't.

For what everyone's working on, stop thinking per project and build a board off a saved filter instead: Boards, Create board, Board from an existing Saved Filter, with JQL spanning whatever slice of the 15 you want in one view. The same filter drives dashboard gadgets, so the cross-team read costs you nothing extra.

Dependencies you already have, in a plainer form than you'd like. The blocks and is blocked by link types carry the relationship and JQL can query them, so "everything currently blocked across these products" is a saved filter away. What Standard won't draw is the lines between them.

Status updates being manual is the one automation genuinely fixes. Standard gives you 1,700 rule runs a month, and a scheduled rule that assembles a delivery digest and posts it where people already look will barely dent that.

Capacity is the real gap and I'd rather say so plainly. There's no cross-team capacity view on Standard, no per-team number to plan against, nothing native that answers "can we take this on". That's the piece Plans buys and Plans is Premium. If the other three get you most of the way, start there, then see whether capacity is still the thing hurting in a month.

[Joshua Brock _ Seibert Group_ GmbH]

Greetings @Tatsiana Gomolko  ...

At ~15 products with real dependencies between some of them, the four questions you listed (what's everyone working on, do we have capacity, where are the dependencies, can status updates be less manual) are really the same underlying problem: nobody has a single connected view across teams, so each question requires manually stitching data together.

Mary's and Gabriela's suggestions above (Planyway, or native Plans/Advanced Roadmaps if you're on Premium or Enterprise) are both reasonable starting points, and keeping Jira as your system of record while adding a planning layer on top, as you described, is the right instinct rather than exporting data elsewhere.

If, alongside "keep Jira as the source of truth," a meaningful number of these products and teams already work toward a shared planning cadence (or you're considering moving in that direction), it's also worth looking at Agile Hive, a SAFe delivery platform built natively in Jira.

It's aimed specifically at the coordination challenges you're describing:

• Automated dependency management and visualization across teams, so "where are the dependencies" becomes a live view instead of a recurring meeting question
• ART and team reports comparing planned load against available capacity across every team, addressing the capacity question directly
• A Program Board gives a single view of what every team is delivering, cutting down the manual status-update work
• A WSJF-prioritized backlog with the full SAFe hierarchy (Epics, Capabilities, Features, Enablers), so work across your 15 products shares one prioritization model instead of 15 separate ones

You can find more here at our website: https://agile-hive.com

Worth being upfront about the trade-off: Agile Hive is built around the SAFe/Program Increment model, so it brings some process structure. If your products operate largely independently, that structure may be more than you need. It's worth deciding whether a shared cadence across teams makes sense for you before adding a tool built around one.

If your products operate largely independently, that structure may be more than you need.

As with my response to your other question/posting, a note of disclosure that I work at Seibert Group GmbH, the team behind Agile Hive.

Best of luck, and hope this helps!

Joshua
Content Writer & US Representative
Agile Hive and Aura Apps (products of Seibert Group GmbH)

[Gabriela]

Jira's own answer to most of that list is Plans (it was called Advanced Roadmaps). One timeline across many projects, capacity per team, dependency lines between items, and it reads from your existing boards, projects or filters rather than holding a second copy of the data.

The catch is the tier. Plans only opens on Premium or Enterprise, so on Standard you're back to dashboards plus filter-based boards, and that's a much more manual setup than the one you're describing.

Which tier are you on? The answer splits hard there.

[Tatsiana Gomolko]

Hi Gabriela,

Thank you for the breakdown. We're on Standard at the moment.