I need expert advice on a question regarding the project setup in my organization!

Vijay Kumar_ln3ogr

Hello All,

When I joined my current organization as a Scrum Lead, I noticed an issue with the project setup. We have one large project called CDP, under which various teams like Jaws, Chronos, Chimera, Apollo, and Hercules operate.

When these teams create a user story, CDP as the project is already set by default in Project Settings. To differentiate their team stories, they assign the story to their team using the 'Assigned Team' field at the user story level. This ensures that the stories appear only on their respective JIRA boards.

The problem arises when I try to close my team's sprint. I can't do it unless all tasks and stories from other teams are also moved to 'Completed' status. For example, if the JAWS team has completed all its work and wants to close the sprint, we can't do so if the Apollo team still has ongoing tasks. This seems to go against Agile/Scrum best practices.

Here are my questions:

1. From an Agile/Scrum practice perspective, is it acceptable to set up the project this way?
2. If not, what are the best practices?
3. Is there a way to change this setup to allow for more autonomous project execution?
4. Are there any workarounds, such as changing current settings, so that each team can close their sprints independently?
5. I believe maintaining this status quo impacts Sprint KPIs. If so, how does it impact them, and what are those KPIs?

Please let me know.

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Vijay Kumar 

There is nothing inherently wrong with having multiple teams working on issues in one project. The best setup for your organization would be based on multiple factors such as:

1. What types of cross-team reporting do you need to do?
2. Are there any concerns with limiting team members to seeing only the issues assigned to their team?
3. Do the teams work on the same sprint cadence or different sprint cadences?

 

It sounds like your teams are sharing their sprints. So, for instance a sprint named "Sprint 1" is created in one of the boards, and all Teams start adding their issues to that one sprint. But it sounds like perhaps they don't really work on the same sprint cadence - they are not aligned to all complete their sprint work by the same date.

Instead each team should be creating its own Sprints in its own board. The Sprint names should contain something to identify the Team to which it belongs so that other teams don't add their issues to the wrong sprint. As long as a sprint for a Team contains issues from only that Team, they should be able to close the sprint without concern for the work being done by other teams.

Jira allows any issue to be added to any sprint. Users can edit the Sprint field directly in an issue to find any available Sprint in the instance and add their issue to it (if they have sufficient permissions).

If Teams are using boards that filter issues based on the Assigned Team, they will see any sprint in which one of the filtered issues has been added, even if that sprint was created in an entirely separate board. However, they will see only the issues from their board's filter in that sprint. If there are other issues that belong to other teams in the sprint, those issues won't show.

For this reason, distinct per-Team sprint names should be used so teams know to add their issues only to sprints that are used by their team.

Additionally it is a good idea to have an overarching scrum board that shows all issues in the project. You can then look at any given sprint and easily see if issues from multiple teams have gotten into one sprint.