Monitoring cross project dependencies with advance roadmap

Zakaria Al Anshor

we have 3 project and each project is dependent each another, 1 project for RnD  1 project for requirement gathering & 1 project for development, each project have dependencies on another project for example :

Project A is the RnD after the status change to particular status that we defined than Project B which is the Requirement gathering can start (Project B can't start before Project A reach that defined status), the same with Project C can only start after Project B reach defined status. 

how do i automate & monitor the overall process of that 3 project on single project using advance roadmap.

 

Thanks

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Zakaria Al Anshor and welcome to the Community!

I hope / assume you understand that your question will not be solved by automating a few simple steps in Jira (or any tool for that matter), but also requires practices/processes in place to define, plan and track ongoing work between the teams involved.

Having said that: advanced roadmaps can indeed help you support your teams and processes.

First of all your projects consist of several tasks that need to be done. When you define your project, you will normally create a hierarchy of those tasks in a work breakdown structure (WBS), where you drill down from the project level to the most finely grained tasks. Each level is represented by issues types, in Jira configured as Project (or Initiative) > Epic > Task (or Story, Bug, ...) > Sub-task. You can add levels above this as well in the Advanced roadmaps hierarchy configuration.

When you say you have 3 projects dependent on each other, I would even dare to challenge the idea. It seems that you rather have 1 project with 3 different stages:

1. RnD
2. Requirement Gathering
3. Development

In Jira, these stages can be remarkably easily matched to the statuses of a workflow. I would suggest you add an issue type Initiative (or project) in Jira and set up a workflow that has these 3 stages.

The work that has to be done in each stage is then specified using issues at the different levels of the WBS. The bigger goals of your project would be Epics, the tasks people will actually be worked on by people would be tasks, stories, ...

As soon as you have the WBS in place, you will find that it is actually dependencies between the actual Epics/Tasks that relate to a stage in your project (workflow status) that will let you manage a visual indicator of where you are in the (advanced) roadmap. So you should define your dependencies there, rather than at the project level.

And yes, you can automate certain things. If you find a way to identify all the epics that are part of the RnD stage, you could build an automation rule that transitions the parent project to the Requirement Gathering status if all Epics are done. However, advanced roadmaps will - even without the automation - provide visibility into how you are progressing. And thus, help your PM evaluate when the project is ready to move into the next stage. As that usually involves decisions made by actual people (e.g. have the project discussed at a board meeting to approve the budget and goals), manually registering things is often required.

Hope this helps!