Best practice managing enhancements

Roy Macaraig

Hello all,

I am a project manager working in an enterprise software implementation project. When we go-live we would like to close the Jira project we are using and transition into an umbrella "project" used in our organization to manage enhancements and other changes for the system that will go live. We would like to have a tracking mechanism for these enhancements and I wanted to ask the community if there are best practices on this topic. The objective is that even if the enhancements are being raised outside of a Jira project, we would like to have the ability to view all enhancements and review all work related to the system. To illustrate my question, see the timeline below:

1. Jan 1, 2022 - we go live with our system, and soon close the Jira project

2. Jan 1, to Dec 31, 2022 - we have some enhancements that will use the umbrella "project"

3. Jan 1, 2023 - we want to review all the tickets from the year (at a minimum it will be a year end review, but we will want to monitor during the year as well)

I understand we may be mixing the concept of project and product support, but at the moment, we are simply using what is available. I am happy to hear ideas from the community who may have some experience on this topic.

 

Regards,

Roy Macaraig

Brant Schroeder

@Roy Macaraig Welcome to the community.  What you are explaining I think is a very common practice when releasing a product.  Moving from project to operational / enhancement / support of the project.  I have done this many times and actually completed a project this January where we made this shift.  I really feel that having strong processes and procedures on how you will manage the transition and work is the most important part of this shift for the team.  If you have structure in place you can easily manage that with the Jira application.  

As an example I will use my latest project for this.  We had a portfolio of projects that we used to manage multiple facets of the project.  When we completed the project we already had a hyper-care / support structure in place.  We had a Jira Service Management project to provide support and collect enhancements from the customers in place and had fully vetted it prior to going live and closing out the project.  During our hyper-care period we were focused on rectifying high priority defect and defects in general.  We also focused on closing out the project.

Once hyper-care ended we had a new project that we used to manage monthly enhancement releases and changes.  These all flowed in through the service desk where we collected information to ensure that it could be properly presented at our weekly change control meeting.  In this meeting we determined which enhancements and changes would be moved forward and scheduled, which ones would be deferred and which ones we would not do.  Once approved they are created in the project and added to a release.  We have different types of work represented by different issue types.  Each type of work has it's own workflow as well as subtasks that are automatically created at the time the issue is created.  

We are able to then report on requests via the service desk and review the amount of work it takes to complete those request out of the software project.  We also run sprints which help us keep track of the work that is being completed each month.