Shared Teams Velocity

[Ryan A]

Hi all, 

Is there a way to report on the cross-project velocity of shared teams setup using Jira Advanced Roadmaps? 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ryan A -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Would you please explain what you mean by "cross-project velocity"? Usually a team just has a velocity measure (or throughput), regardless of what valuable work they are doing.

Understanding this may help the community to offer you suggestions.  Thanks!

Best regards,
Bill

[Ryan A]

Hi Bill, Sure, so in Jira Advanced Roadmaps we have shared teams, and to understand that teams velocity (as far as I can tell) I need to run a velocity report on each project that team has worked on, and then add up the figures for a given sprint to understand the velocity overall. Is there a way to roll this up, or is my process the only way for now?

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for explaining that, Ryan.  I have seen this done at least two ways, each with pros/cons:

1. A team has a board (somewhere...) which covers all of their work.  The filter could span one or more projects.  Then the reports for that team's board reflect their capacity and throughput.
2. Even though people are on a "team", when they are a shared team perhaps the individual people are temporarily on another team completely.  Then their capacity is only relevant to the team to which they are on-loan.

[Ryan A]

Thanks @Bill Sheboy the first option would work well, but the complication I've had is in sprint planning, it seems that if I want to prioritise from a collective backlog, based on a board that filters in from multiple projects, some of the functionality that would usually make backlog grooming easier (like drilling down by epics on the left-hand side) looses it's utility because you end up with a long list of epics from multiple projects and it's hard to focus on any one project/functional area at a time because you can't temporarily filter by project in the ways that you can by epic. 

The path I went down was to create individual sprints on a project level so that I could plan from the individual project backlogs, but to then roll all of these projects up into a single filtered board for a cross-project view. 

But what I failed to consider is that this will make a headache of velocity reporting, because I can only report on sprint velocity by a single sprint, not batched sprints. 

Have I understood this properly? If so, I might need to change approach. I'm sure there's functionality in Jira align that would make cross-project sprint planning a little easier, but the price point is set so high I'm trying to see if we can make do with Jira

[Bill Sheboy]

I am not using Jira Align so I cannot help there...perhaps others in the community can chime in.

Regarding your thoughts about filtering for refinement/planning (in your first paragraph), you could add a quick filter to the board/backlog, allowing you to just see what is needed...hiding the other projects.