Looking for the best hierarchy to set up in JIRA from intake to delivery

Question

We are setting up a new JIRA board (project) for our Software platform to accomplish an agile and scrum model of SDLC (moving from a pseudo waterfall/agile model). What is the best way to 'intake' requests from my business stakeholders in a specific format into our JIRA board to start kicking off our project life cycle process. I also want to make sure our board also provides visibility to project milestones, track approvals and show requests that came from other boards. TIA

avenkata · Answer

Thank you for replying Shawn. Part of our 'intake' conversation involves flushing out those details. We have a set of questions that our stakeholder reps need to fill out which will be used as the basis for our scoping conversation to then decide if it needs be on our project or not. Like if we decide in the intake conversation that this request can be elevated to a project, it will be assigned to our roadmap or further scoping depending on the size of the ask. Alternatively, if the request can be served by means outside of our platform, we will do so during the call and close the request with alternatives decided. This closed request will not move forward in our JIRA board. Trying to see how best to solve for this process need.

As for going full agile - we have already gained on this alignment across different teams and working towards structuring ourselves around it.

Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM · Answer

It depends.

Before onboarding any project I like to flesh things out with the main stakeholders and agree on paradigms, naming conventions, and workflows.  You mention Agile, (and are brave enough to say pseudo) so you understand that Agile means different things to different people, find the common terms, and work from there.

Once all that is more or less inline, then try to keep it simple, pick the project types and keep customizations and addons to a limited amount.