Kanban board states struggle

Question

Hello,

In our company we have one common model of states supported through whole organisation. My problem is, i need more complex workflow for my squad and to do that I´m forced to do "double taping" i.e. one of other squads create me an Epic. This Epic is only processable through standard flow and thus far I'm forced to create duplicate for my flow. At the end of the day I have to proces both of them (don't mentioning the physical post-its). In following pictures is depicted the current state of board and something I would like to have (not possible atm). Green tagged states are my states and the red ones are common company states.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot for Your inputs and have a great day

Tomáš

Antoine Berry · Answer

Atlassian team do read these posts, but sometimes it is difficult to answer each of them.

Also, I do not think there is a "magical" solution to your issue and it needs to be thoroughly thought on your level as well. That being said, here are some leads I would consider :

- From a jira POV, it makes more sense to have a project for each team that have their own worklow. Add managers to a special group and use this group in project role so that it has read access on the projects. Use the correct status category for each status (IE blue/yellow/green - to do/in progress/done). Because looking at your "official" statuses, it is pretty much only three of them (And I would advise to map "Rejected" to "Done" status with "rejected" resolution). The boards, filters, kanbans, jql etc. can be adjusted to use these categories instead. Train the managers to assess workflow progress based on these categories.

- Create a new issue type that is a sub-task and map it with the custom workflow of the squad. Auto-create that sub-task on Epic creation and create a statuses mapping table between the epic and the subtask. Auto-trigger transitions on the Epic upon status change in the sub-task. That is gonna require a lot of customization and administration.

- Similar to the previous point, auto duplicate and link the "official" issue into a "squad" issue that triggers the "squad" issue when it reaches a specific status.

Note that you could also only use one project, and use different issue types and auto map them to group picker fields, and allow permissions according to that group picker.

Anyway very interesting topic, but in the long run I would strongly advise the first solution. Easy to grasp for admins/users, easy to report key metrics. Create a tips/best practice training guide and spread it.

John Funk · Answer

Hi Tomáš - Welcome to the Community!

We use a common workflow in our organization, and it works quite well. Some caveats, though - you have to use the same statuses from the workflow in order for that to work. To don't have to use all of the statuses, but all of the ones you use need to be in the same workflow even if you don't use them.

In your example, either you need to use the In Progress status as a part of your work flow or they need to use one of yours. You can have multiple statuses on your board, but you can only show the one status in a single column.

This is very hard to describe without discussing in person, but I hope that helps guide you a little.

Tomáš Faltýnek · Answer

This is actually happening, problem is that my workflow is not compatible with theirs...We are big company with dozens of teams and above them is structure that wants to see what is happening. That actually eliminates cross team epic/story/task sharing becouse if every team has its own incompatible workflow other teams needs to know to which team they are sending their task. Idealy there is only one "official" workflow where everybody could see if their task is in processing stage or done and underneath it is other more fragmented one for the team/squad purposes. I'm looking for some clues about this as other teams give up and started to use "official" simple workflow and more detail one moved to "post-it, pen, wall" environment :-)

From your experience, does anyone from Atlassian reads these posts? Becouse if not I'm not really sure that there is some simple solution :-)