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What is the best way to add external partners to our Jira board without disrupting our daily work?

sarah.barbu

We will be working with external vendors on a specific project, however we do not want to create a separate Jira board for this project. We would like to include the external vendors to our existing one as this "specific project" is part of our daily work. Our IT team is very small, so they will need to prioritize other work amongst this project.

I previously worked in Kanbanize and it allowed for multiple swimlanes. We were able to create two swimlanes for each company within the same board, workflow and sprint.

Is this possible in Jira?

I saw a feature with parallel sprints, however this only was available through Next Gen projects. When I create a new project I do not have the option of Classic or NextGen, only Team vs Company Managed. Not sure which is what.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

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KAGITHALA BABU ANVESH_z1zl10

Hello @sarah.barbu

Welcome to Atlassian Community …!

Now NextGen projects are renamed as --> Team Managed Projects

Classic projects are renamed as --> Company managed Projects.

No worries.

Thanks

sarah.barbu

Ok, thanks! I had it reversed. Team Managed Projects doesn't allow for parallel sprints, only Company managed projects.

KAGITHALA BABU ANVESH_z1zl10

Team Managed Projects are something for hands-on for new users with very less customizations. so there is Parallel sprints.

For company managed projects --> yes we can able to start multiple Parallel sprints.

The settings are here in your Jira - the below from Atlassian Documentation.

Enabling parallel sprints

Log in as a user with the Administer Jira global permission.
Click Settings ()> Products, then scroll down the page to the Jira Software section.
Under Jira Software configuration, select the Parallel Sprints checkbox.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Welcome to the Community!

The question here is how you are telling Jira that an issue belongs to one company or another.

The really obvious way to do it is having a "company" field on the issues and you simply select one when you create the issue. With a field like that, you can create swimlanes with simple JQL (define swimlane 1 as "company = company-a", swimlane 2 as "company = company-b" and so-on)

Parallel sprints are not really a solution here. A sprint is a time-box in which to do things, it's not a way to differentiate between external companies.

"Classic" and "Next gen" are old terms, Atlassian has re-branded them with better names, more indicative of what the project types are for. Classic changed to Company-managed, and Next-gen is now Team-managed.

From memory, Team-managed (Next-gen) projects do not support parallel sprints.

sarah.barbu

Thank you, that makes sense. I originally wanted to create separate swimlanes so the external vendor didn't have to navigate through all the other cards on the board that didn't pertain to them. They would have their own swimlane with all the cards they need to focus on (in the same sprint).

Sorry, I am new to this software, so I apologize in advance if I'm not explaining/asking in the correct terminology. Is there a way to use the simple JQL on the board? not on the Issues tab? When we have standup or walk through the board, I can filter the board to show the epic = project AND the issues associated for both companies?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Nothing to apologise for!

I like the idea of swimlanes by company, but I would question if it is right or the best option for all the users of that board. It could be, but I'm also imagining a team of developers who don't really care who the external vendors are, their board would work better for them if they had swimlanes done by story, or epic, technology, component, priority, assignee, etc.

But there are plenty of options for you here, in company-managed projects at least.

A board for company-managed projects has several layers of filters that really do lend themselves to the sort of thing you are looking to do here.

The main filter for a board selects all the issues that the team might need to see on their board. I know that sounds odd, more complex than "issues to go on the board", but that's because a board is actually two things - the active board and the backlog for it. The filter is selecting issues that are in the backlog and the board. Anyway, that's the most important filter, and it is very often a simple "Project = XYZ order by rank". But you can have them select totally different things. In my last job, my team's board selected something like "Project in (Jira Admin, Confluence Admin, Tech writers) or label = techauth".

Kanban boards have a second sub-filter, which is for hiding "released" issues. The default is something that makes the board ignore issues that have a released fix-version set on them. Again, you can change it, but it's a bit clumsy if you do.

The next three are of more interest to you, as they give you the viewing options you might want:

Swimlanes can be based on story, assignees, epics, projects, or you can define your own filter for each lane
Cards can be coloured, by using a filter (so you could do something like "bug = red, test = green, documentation-task = blue")
Quick filters will hide all but the issues they select for from the board, as a simple toggle

So, for your case, I think I'd actually want to let the team decide what swimlanes they want (if any), but then define quickfilters, one for each external vendor, so that the people using the board can click something and hide all the issues that are not for the one vendor you selected!

sarah.barbu

We use a board for team managed projects. Best suggestion for this type?

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