Managing shared workload between initiatives and epics

henry_bersani

Hi all,

 

I'm managing a program of work that includes initiatives with set milestones some of which will be delivered by multiple teams. I'm using a jira planning board for visibility and pre-existing team boards for delivery. My goal is to minimize the number of spaces teams/people need to work in so I need a solution to the following problem:

How do I let teams contribute to a shared milestone without leaving their home board?

The current structure is as follows

1. Strategic Priority (Strategy item, sits in advanced planning roadmap)
   1. Initiative (Initiative item, sits in advanced planning roadmap)
      1. Milestone (essentially a workstream; ??? item type, needs to sit in advanced planning roadmap - this is where the problem lies)
         
         1. Deliverable 1 (Epic, sits in team #1 board)
         2. Deliverable 2 (Epic, sits in team #2 board)

I want visibility over the deliverables in the advanced roadmap view so I can see where the different team deliverables are contributing to the overall delivery of the milestones.

Does anyone have a solution they can share for this that doesn't require a plugin? (We're a privacy company and heavily locked down).

Ajay _view26_

Hi @henry_bersani 

What you’re describing is usually handled best by using Plans / Advanced Roadmaps as the cross-team view, while keeping execution on each team’s own board.

A structure that generally works is:
- Initiative (higher roadmap level)
- Milestone / Workstream (another hierarchy level above Epic, if you really need it)
- Team Epics on each delivery board
- Stories/tasks under those epics on the team boards

The key point is that the team epics can stay on the team boards, while still rolling up into the higher-level roadmap item in Plans, as long as your hierarchy is configured correctly. Atlassian’s hierarchy docs for Plans support adding levels above Epic, and Plans can then show those parent/child rollups across spaces/projects.

So instead of making teams work in a separate “program board,” I’d usually do this:
1. keep delivery work in the existing team boards
2. create a higher-level item in the roadmap for the shared milestone/workstream
3. make each team’s Epic a child of that milestone/initiative
4. use Plans for the portfolio/master schedule view, not as the place where teams do day-to-day work

If multiple teams are contributing to the same milestone, I would not try to make one shared Epic owned by multiple teams. I’d keep one Epic per team and roll them up to a common parent item in Plans. That tends to preserve ownership and board clarity while still giving you milestone visibility.