Looking for advice how to setup JIRA to support FULL project and portfolio life-cycle.

Roman Lublinsky_5l2s65

Curious to know if anyone managed to build JIRA configuration supporting multiple project management from idea to full project delivery?

The issues I have:

1. How to handle incoming ideas/requests for the project initiation?
   1. Currently separate JIRA project ~ "Project Portfolio". All new ideas registered here and handled until approved or rejected by company Board.
2. How to handle it further within JIRA after idea was approved by the Board and has to be scheduled for delivery (programming)?
   1. We have two separate development teams for different independent products, that might be affected by the requested project. Each team has it's own JIRA project. Different workflow steps, of course... All features requests and bugs are registered in team's project.
   2. It feels like for really BIG (100+ epics / 6+ months) cross team projects worth separating in separate JIRA project.

Questions:

1. Does maintaining "Project Portfolio" (PP) project make sense? Or there are better ways of handling incoming flow of project ideas?
   1. Until idea is approved - certain tasks are performed by PMO and analytical team, their tasks has to be created and handled somewhere.
2. When idea is approved for delivery - what shall be smart way of putting it further to development team(s)?
   1. We keep Idea type in PP project and create linked epics in respective team's projects.
   2. For BIG project - shall Idea from PP be archived and separate JIRA project for idea's content be created?

Probably rather chaotic... but puzzle is about - how to (literally) handle planning & track progress of dozens of ongoing parallel projects (separate business owners, budgets, deadlines etc.) spread between two development teams, team of project managers and analytical team?

Thanks beforehand for any detailed advice!

Danny_qtq7b3

Hello @Roman Lublinsky

I will endeavour to help and support where I can on this, though as you mentioned it is a quite a loaded question. Let's see, where to begin:

Does maintaining "Project Portfolio" (PP) project make sense? Or there are better ways of handling incoming flow of project ideas?

Until idea is approved - certain tasks are performed by PMO and analytical team, their tasks has to be created and handled somewhere.

It makes sense if everyone in the organisation understands what its there to achieve. If there ideas before concept of a project, the tracking of ideas before project conception, would be contained in a centralised project that encapsulates the organisations goals or initiatives. 

The PMO and Analytical team tasks sound repetitive, have you considered an automated solution to speed up this process?

I would suggest only keeping the high-level idea/initiative in the Project Portfolio and transfer the Epics and so forth to the new Jira project that would be set up to contain the issues broken down from the idea/initiative.

When idea is approved for delivery - what shall be smart way of putting it further to development team(s)?

1. We keep Idea type in PP project and create linked epics in respective team's projects.

2. For BIG project - shall Idea from PP be archived and separate JIRA project for idea's content be created?

Do you have a project charter on a centralised documentation area like Confluence to link from your new Jira project? It would help anyone looking in to see which team is responsible for delivery, the product owner, the main objective of the project, the problem the project is trying to solve, the other goals the project is hoping to achieve, etc. 

I think keeping the ideas/initiatives in the PP project is efficient for Jira, you could even hook in Portfolio for Jira and visually see your entire Portfolio broken down from those initial ideas/initiatives to the stories that will incrementally get you closer to achieving them. 

I would not archive the original idea in the PP project until it has either been rejected, and therefore closed, or achieved the idea through delivery. This will allow you to report on any outstanding ideas in Jira, and it also does not confuse anyone looking at issues linked to the ideas and seeing there is no active value in the issue's delivery unless they navigate to the idea itself and view the status/resolution.

Hopefully this has helped and if you have the time please let me know if I can help any further.

Thanks,

Danny