Setting up JIRA for two different teams with different workflows but interact on same tickets

Question

Objective

Improve the board setup to allow both teams (development and business / product management) to manage their workflows effectively while maintaining clarity and ease of use. Keeping in mind that there is often back and forth between teams on tickets and also tickets that need client feedback.

Current Jira Setup and Company Structure

We are a startup with 13 employees; 6-7 actively use Jira.

Teams

Development and Business/Product Management.

Current Board

Single Kanban board for all tasks. Columns: Inbox, To Do Business, To Do Development, In Progress, Awaiting Review, Awaiting Release, Done, Hold, Backlog.

Usage

Support tickets and feature requests are added to the board after triage. Development team uses all columns except "To Do Business".

"To Do Business" is for tasks requiring action from the business team or client interaction.

Problem

The business team struggles to manage their tasks as they only have one column ("To Do Business"), making it difficult to track progress, client interactions, and pending actions.

Tasks often require back-and-forth between business and development teams, adding complexity. The business team also needs to go to clients to get feedback before good my back to development team so need to better track that.

considerations

Splitting into two separate boards for development and business teams seems ideal but presents difficulties in moving tickets between boards. It seems to take a lot of clicks to move a ticket and isn’t straightforward.

A single board will include irrelevant columns for the different teams, leading to potential clutter and confusion. Any suggestions would be welcome

Tommaso Gionfriddo _Adeptask_ · Answer

Hi @Alex Kountourides

I think ultimately it is really dependent on how much work is done by the business each time an issue is moved to the "To Do Business" column currently.

If the work really is minimal, then what you could do is create a number of statuses for use by the Business team, show only those statuses on the Business team's board, and then show all of those statuses in one column on the Dev team's board.

This would allow the dev team to know that the business was working on the item without cluttering the board, and allow the business team to track their work with a level of granularity. To move between boards each team would simply need to drag to another status

Otherwise, if the business team is doing a large amount of work each time, then I wonder if you might be better off introducing another level of hierarchy to the work you are tracking?
If you were to use a parent (Epic like) issue to track the overall feature etc. being delivered, you could then have child issues in this parent issue are tracked individually on the respective team's boards.

Alex Kountourides · Answer

Ah I see so have two separate boards (Business and Development). On each board maybe there is a certain column where if the ticket it put in that column in then creates the ticket in the other board for that team to look at.

The only potential issue is that this could end up creating lots of duplicate tickets?

Nicolas Grossi · Answer

@Alex Kountourides Welcome! Workflows are per issue type and project.

You might have one project with the integrated workflow and activities and as many projects with different issues type (per team) and in certain "condition" triggers something in the integrated workflow ?

HTH

Nicolas