How are companies setting up the EPIC pipeline in Align in conjunction with business cases?

J. Britten

We are just getting started with Agile and have a Lean Business Case (total of 20 data points all relating to OKR alignment, Enterprise Alignment, # of teams, value prop, etc) when the business cases are approved is when we are providing EPICs to the portfolios which remain in their backlog until they are ready to work on them.

There is some want to have an EPIC before the business case is approved so I thought that I would pulse check this community to see what other companies are doing as far as demand pipelines are concerned.

We currently have our business cases in Clarity PPM and still require our teams to log time against the approved EPIC investments.  

Can we do business cases in Align or is that Confluence?

Thank you in advance

Steve Sauser

@J. Britten Great question and we have answers!  

Epics (below Themes and above either Features or Capabilities if you have Capabilities turned on) have multiple tabs where information is available to be entered/stored.  

Specifically in this case we will talk about the tabs called "Intake" and "Benefits".   

1. If these tabs are not available to you, work with your Administrator to have the role toggle turned on.  
2. Intake and Benefits tabs have customizable forms that can be applied to a given Portfolio. 
   1. There are Text type and Dropdown type fields available. 
3. The Intake tab will allow you to add many data elements and is typically used to store data about the initial idea.  
4. The Benefits tab comes with a number of pre-formed items as well as any that you add using the custom forms. 
   1. Specifically you will find an "Approvers" field where you can enter the people who need to approve and they will get notified in the Bell so they can review and approve.  
   2. Once approved individuals can access the Benefits tab, click on the green button next to the Approvers field and you can see each person's approval (or declination) as well as the date it was completed. 
5. In order to customize the fields in either the Intake or Benefits tab you will need an Administrator to create an Epic Intake Set (Intake tab) and a Case Development Set (Benefits tab). 
   1. These are found in Administration --> Platform --> Portfolio
   2. Once created the Admin will also need to access Adminstration --> Portfoilios --> Select the Portfolio and then update the Intake Form and Case Development Custom Fields to associate the created forms to the Portfolio. 
   3. This allows one to use the same or different Intake and Benefits fields across Portfolios.  

You also mentioned logging hours against the work inside Clarity.  You can accomplish this in Jira as well and it can translate them to show the effort (time/hours) spent from the Sub-task (if you so choose) or the Story level in Jira which will then sum up that information to the parents of the Stories all the way up to the Epic systemically.  

• This is a bit more involved process than we can probably advise here in Community due to the number of factors and configurations that we would need to explore with you.  
• If you don't have an Advisory Services Engagement it would be highly beneficial to consider such an engagement as we can offer you a deep benefit with an engagement like this.  

Please let us know if you have additional questions on the Intake/Benefits tabs.  

 

Reference Materials:

Intake Sets 

Case Development