Suggestion for the best approach in JIRA to manage lifecycle of products that has multiple verticals

Question

Our company works with IoT projects. We are dealing with multiple verticals like cloud, hardware and embedded for the development of one single IoT product. We are trying to manage the lifecycle of our products encompassing all three verticals using JIRA Software. Combining the entire tasks from all the three verticals will lead to one broad project which would make the project management a strenuous activity. Treating each vertical as an individual project in JIRA will make it difficult to get an estimate on the progress of a task that encompasses all 3 verticals. Please suggest us the most proficient approach in JIRA that we can take up, to deal with this scenario

Rigo Sanchez · Answer

Hi @Jerrin Jose and @Phil McTimoney , I am currently researching this issue. I am leaning towards separate projects and using a third party tool (maybe BigPicture?) to help bring everything together. Have either of you been able to zero in on an efficient approach to this issue?

P.S. I sent you both a request on LinkedIn (at least I hope I messaged the correct people) to try and connect to speak about this issue further.

Phil McTimoney_upk6ev · Answer

Hi Jerrin, I am researching  a similar approach. I don't have the silver bullet! However, if you want to connect please feel free to find me on LinkedIn. My name is easy to find! I am not selling anything - just wanted to see if we can help each other.

-- Phil McTimoney

Anna-BigPicture · Answer

Hi @Jerrin Jose

Having to combine and manage multiple dimensions of a product is not an easy task. It gets even harder when there is a number of products and related projects that have to be taken into account.
In such a case, a good solution is a Box concept that you can find in the BigPicture application.

You can use a Box to represent your product (you can create multiple Boxes - each for one product you have). Then for each Box, you can define a separate scope. Note that scope in the BigPicture box is a freely defined collection of tasks based on a combination of multiple Jira projects, boards, or filters (it is a very flexible solution).

You can use the same projects in more than one Box. In such a case, you could, for example, add some differentiator to chosen issues depending on the product they belong to and take it into account while narrowing down the scope with JQL.

Moreover, the BigPicture application has its own Board module, which you can synchronize with multiple Jira boards and sprints.

To summarize, you can have a dedicated Boxes for each of your products, and each of the Boxes would have a BigPicture Board allowing you to plan and iteratively manage work on these products even though issues come from different Jira projects.

Worth mentioning that BigPicture supports teamwork which means that you can compose teams for each product and manage a workload and availability of Teams per Box, which in your case would mean per Product.

Please let me know if you have more questions.

Anna