How to do slicing of Epics

Question

I am looking for a way to slice Epics, and prioritize and track the progress of a slicing level.

In our organisation, Features are tied to components. A combination of features often delivers value, but not all the value delivered by the entire Epic. Negotiations with customers are also often done based on slices.

Hence we are looking for ways to do slicing of Epics and prioritize the slices and track them.

Allan Maxwell · Answer

While it may initially be a pain for some folks to create a placeholder slice, it will have some benefits in the long run: more uniform sizing, creativity in slicing and ease of reporting.

If you begin your agile journey at the team-level, with Scrum for example, you will quickly find that the meaning of a 3 point Story can vary wildly across your organization.  Once you begin to scale agile up to the higher levels it is beneficial to achieve some level of consistency in sizing.  SAFe suggests you start with something like 1 point is a person/day but once you get going then "never look back".  I think there are advantages to more uniformity in sizing, especially at the Feature level.  Introducing Capabilities often has the side-effect of naturally reducing the range in sizes of Features.

It sounds like your slices are tied to components. You may find that introducing slices across the entire organization will lead to more creative use of the concept of slices.  One example would be to extend the prioritizing, planning, executing, releasing of Features to areas outside of engineering or IT.  For example, many organization do not track how much effort goes into prioritizing the next release of work against all submitted/potential work.

Jira Align reporting is able to work with either slicing or not ...or both.  You may be developing your own reports using Enterprise Insights or Atlassian Analytics.  Any report above the ART level will be complicated by needing to support a mixed mode with only half the organization using slices.

Ruben Stam · Answer

We've looked at Capabilities but what we run into is that capabilities are then mandatory, also when we would not want to do slicing. Any thoughts?

Allan Maxwell · Answer