Set up Jira for multi country rollout

[Karen888]

problem:

How should JIRA be set up so that you can track which stage each country is at, who is doing what, how much capacity do we have for add'l tasks, etc? 

The dev team recently started working in an iterative manner a few months prior and are working towards agile/scaled agile. 

we currently only have a Jira backlog for dev tasks for post go live issues like bugs.

I recently just joined the global team as a product owner. 

background: 

We're in the midst of rolling out an out of the box product to 58 countries over a one - two year period. about 25% of the countries have gone live to date. 

We're also trying to include some enhancements when there is some quick to implement value adds. 

Each country has similar tasks/stages - discovery,  configuration, data migration, UAT, go live etc.  There are some differences like integrations required that internal devs need to work on and language translations. 

Since it's such a large effort, two vendors were also hired to handle a portion of the countries that have more complex integrations and larger amounts of data to move. 

multiple countries are being worked on in parallel but with different kickoff and go live dates as we don't have the capacity to migrate all the changes at the same time. 

As you can imagine there's issues with communication, estimating timelines, understanding how much dev capacity we have due to the large scope of this project which covers multiple timezones with the teams also distributed in many timezones. 

Should each country be a separate EPIC or Feature or separate board?

Any ideas would be much appreciated. 

[Mark Segall · Accepted solution]

Hi @Karen888 and welcome to the community!

Here are my thoughts...

1. 1 Project Per Country - I would say that the scope seems large enough for each country to be its own project (you can easily create projects with shared configuration)

2. Advanced Roadmaps - You can pull all of the projects into advanced roadmaps for one scaled plan.
3. Leverage Initiatives - Along with #2 above, create the Initiatives issue type (this is my go to article for handling larger programs in Jira). 
   Note - I typically create a dedicated project for initiatives so that they can be consolidated in one location.
4. Shared Boards - you can "roll up" each project into groups (e.g. NA vs EMEA or Countries 1, 2, 3 vs 4, 5, 6) leveraging shared board filters and project categories so that those wishing to see things at a higher level can follow along on tactical activity without having to navigate across multiple boards.
5. Heavy use of dashboards
6. Automation - Since you seem to have repeatable processes, you could leverage automation to auto-populate

[Karen888]

Thanks Mark for all the helpful guidance!