Unified Sprints/PIs

Question

Is there a way to use a single set of sprints over many projects?

Using Jira Premium + Advanced roadmaps. I've Setup all Product Dev Managers/RTEs/etc to create sprints and close them.  But we have a ton of departments and many products. These each have their own Jira project and teams. Managing all these people to create the same sprint dates, manage, and close them the same is a PITA.

I'd love a unified sprint that I can apply to multiple projects and teams. Is this possible in native Jira?

Allan.Neuhaus · Answer

Luckily we can forgo ARs as they are not the source of the issue.

Only using Company Managed projects. You nailed to a T exactly what I ended up landing on as a stop gap.   In projects that need multiple independent teams, we create the sprints on one team/board and create a placeholder story on the other teams to make that sprint show up on that teams board. It is a pain having to create placeholder stories for every sprint just to make them show up.

What I need is a single unified sprint controlled by an RTE/admin. I'd love to have that sprint at higher level or at least at a project level. The issue is that Jira wants to confine a Sprint to a board rather than at a higher level. Sprints and PIs are static and based on the Calendar. I don't want to run a company with 10+ products require sprint creation on every board (every team) because it takes so long to manage. At scale it would nearly be a full time job just creating and managing sprints across a company.

Maybe I am using Jira incorrectly, but this simply does not appear to scale with anything like Agile.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Caveat - I am not deeply familiar with Advanced Roadmaps, so there may be cross project/plan sprint features of which I am unaware.

Jira does not restrict which issues can be added to a sprint. By editing the Sprint field directly you can specify any sprint from any board that you have permission to see.

However...

If you are using both Company Managed and Team Managed projects/boards there is not a clean method for combining the issues into shared sprints while also enabling the teams using Team Managed projects to use the board native to the Team Managed project.

Additionally, a Sprint will show on a board (a Company Managed project board or a manually created cross-project board) if any of the following are true:

1. The sprint was created in that board.

2. The sprint includes an issue that is within the scope of the Filter Query for that board.

When a sprint is initially created and empty, it shows only in the board where it was created. If your teams using Company Managed projects all have their own boards, the new and empty sprint will not show in all the boards and there is no way to force it to show while it is empty.

The only way, natively, to truly use shared sprints and ensure that the new and empty sprints are available to all teams is to use one scrum board that encompasses the issues for all teams and have all teams use that one board. Or, if you have scrum masters managing the sprints, have the scrum masters use the one master board and let each team have a second board that filters to just their issues. It would then be the scrum masters' responsibility to use the master board to populate the sprints with issues for their scrum teams.

Since I am not very familiar with AR I'm not sure how this would affect individual teams' plans.