Organization of work

Question

Hi,
I'm wondering how to structure JIRA to fit the way I work in my organization.

What the company looks like:
- we have many projects and many PMs
- we have specialized teams: iOS, Android, DevOps, Web... Which have their own team leaders.

How we currently configured JIRA:
- teams are projects e.g. the Android team has its own project where it keeps all tasks from multiple projects
- if a task requires the work of another team it is created in another team project and then linked by a relationship

For example:
Projects:
- Android (AND-P1, AND-P2, AND-P3...)
- Web (WEB-P1, WEB-P2 (blocks AND-P3), WEB-P3)
- ...

I don't know if this is optimal, but I feel it is not.

What problems we have:
- Team Leaders can see the occupancy of their teams (I'm looking for some plugin e.g. BigPictures shows the load per program, ok I can create a program from a given project, but this also seems suboptimal to me)
- PMs have problems with creating and visualizing schedules (here BigP helps, but it requires quite extensive filters - but it still does not solve the issue mentioned above).

Do you think that such organization of work is optimal? Maybe you have some suggestions?
What plugins for resource and schedule management do you recommend?

Regards,

Pawel Bah · Answer

In an ideal world, we create a project and allocate resources to it - this is a very simple approach.

Things get complicated when resources are shared. That is, at one time a person works in e.g. 3 projects (of course with different level of involvement).

What I miss in BigP is support for TechLeads so that they can easily plan the work of their employees. The only thing I was able to come up with was creating a separate PROG, which after some query collects tasks of all team members. Internally, however, I feel that this is not very elegant.
@Jacob Vu

Jacob Vu · Answer

Hi @Pawel Bah

I'm a PM and track projects/products using BigP so hopefully I can provide some input here.

I think it's still better to separate teams into individual Jira projects as it's easier to manage work for them without the need to use components. If you want to reduce the amount of projects that you have, teams that share the same issue types, workflows, etc. could work in a singular project, but I would start using components so that you can separate the various teams' work.

In terms of creating projects into BigP, there's no way around using more complex JQL, I don't think. You could potentially use labels and label all tasks that are part of a project/product to make the JQL easier, but labels can be inconsistent and you can't necessarily control labels.

Something to think about is potentially upgrading (if you can) to Jira Software premium as it allows you to use Advanced Roadmaps and create 'Initiatives', which is a level above epics. This would allow you to group pieces of work easier in a single initiative, and then push that information into Advanced Roadmaps or BigP using the Initiative type as JQL.

Hopefully that helps.

Jacob

Juan Felipe Cardona · Answer

Hello Pawel

I would say, give it a try just as you designed it... one of the advantages of Jira is that you can start fast, small and simple, and afterward you will adjust your process (workflows, permissions, schemas, etc.) if you really need it.

Regarding your different projects, keep in mind that you can always have boards that include several projects... maybe trying to have the same workflow (statuses and transitions in your projects) might help if you are planning to create multi-project boards.

Good luck!