Tracking the source of demand & effort required

[Peter Norris]

We currently use a "Demand" ticket as a way for teams to log requests with other, internal teams. Following that ticket, a number of Epics or Stories may be spawned off it.

I've had a request to be able to log the initial estimate of effort in the Demand ticket, and then add up the Story Points associated to the actual work items that delivered the work - and then have the ability to log the total effort back in the original Demand ticket.

This way the team doing the work can see WHERE their demand is coming from based on actual effort required, and as a by-product, how ACCURATE their original effort was.

Any thoughts on best practice for doing this?

I'm open to scrapping the current way of working; really looking for best practice on how this is commonly accomplished.

[Mercy]

A clean way to handle this in Jira Cloud is to treat your “Demand” issue as a parent or tracking item and link all delivery Epics or Stories to it using issue links or the parent/child hierarchy available in Advanced Roadmaps. You can record the initial estimate as either a Story Point or time estimate field on the Demand ticket, then use automation to roll up the actual effort from the linked work items. In Jira Cloud automation, set a rule that triggers when a Story or Epic is updated and uses the “Branch: Related issues” action on linked issues with type “relates to” (or whatever link type you use) to sum their Story Points and write the total back to a custom field on the Demand issue.