Consolidating work from multiple projects into sprints and backlog

Jean-Mark Wright

I have a couple of different projects that I do work from. Ideally, I'd love to have a single point of reference for all my tasks. Ideally I want to work from one project and have that project pull in tasks from another project into the backlog and the sprint. What's the recommended way to accomplish this? Also, how does team vs company-wide projects affect this?

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Jean-Mark Wright 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

An issue exists in one and only one project at a time. So you can't "pull in" to your project issues that exist in another project. You could make a copy of the original issue with that copy being in your project, but then those are two separate issues that can be changed independently of each other.

It is possible to create a Scrum board that pulls information from multiple projects. That sounds like what you need.

You would create and save a filter that selects all the issues that you want to include in your Scrum board.

You would then create the Scrum board based on the saved filter.

Note that issues can also be in only one planned or active sprint at a time. So if the other project is managing the same issue in a sprint you cannot put it in a sprint of your own.

Regarding your question about Team vs. Company Managed projects and the impact of those...

Company Managed projects and Team Managed projects use two different fields for story points; Company Managed projects use the "Story points" field while Team Managed projects use the field "Story point estimate". If you are estimating based on story points you can't combine that information from the different project times in a single Scrum board. A Scrum board created from a saved filter would reflect only the "Story points" data from Company Managed project issues in Scrum reports that are based on story points.

Another difference is that Team Managed projects have their own distinct Status values in the workflow. Even if both the Team Managed project and the Company Managed project issues use a status named "Done", those are different statuses in the underlying database. So you have to make sure to map all the statuses to columns correctly, and reports that roll up statistics based on issue status would reflect those as different statistics.

Additionally a Team Managed project can't have multiple boards linked to it. The Location of the extra board could be set to a Company Managed project, or your profile, but not the Team Managed project.

Those are some of the impacts of combining information from two such projects in one board.