Organizing work into workstreams within a particular intiiative.

[Bhuvaneswari Vasudevan]

I'm looking of best approach to handle our scenario as we are starting our journey to deliver multiple initiatives as part of our roadmap for next 12-18 months.

Our product team uses idea in JPD to  represent the initiatives under our roadmap and the features under each of them as epics. Once the work is committed, we create an initiative in Jira and epics underneath it.  Most of the DEV work related to configuration is being handled as Task work item.

Challenge:

Within each initiative we have workstreams and each workstream has set of internal (Eg Internal beta) and external (user facing) milestones. Each workstream might have one or more epics and may have multiple releases like  Alpha, Beta.

1)We are unable to figure out the best way to represent workstreams apart from the suggestion to use labels. Is there a better way to group work within Jira as workstreams?

2) What is the best way to represent milestones for each of the workstream and also to differentiate between the internal and external releases?

3) We are hoping to use the release - Deployment ticket to differentiate between different releases. Do you see any challenges in associating milestones with the deployment cards?

4) We would like to setup a view in plan that will have below hierarchy for each initiative:

Level 1: Initiative   (Project)  ==> This might run for 12-18 months

Level 2: Workstreams  ==> This might run for 3-6 months

Milestones to be setup for each workstream

Level 3: Epics for each workstream that will group the work required to deliver the outcome

Level 4: Work items

5) How do we best capture the baseline date for the workstreams and initiative level and track the dates when there are change request for start and end dates?

6) Our development team has been using Task for any work that is not related to product feature (Eg setting up infrastructure components, API integration etc). THis has led to losing visibility on the work accomplished. How best to handle the Developer only work related to configuration, infrastructure setup etc.

Appreciate any reference to use cases/implementations that has used such scenario.