Idea submission and tracking candidates through development process

Question

I have started at a new company that use Jira. I manage work from a big marketing department and my process is as follows:

* The Marketing team to submit un-triaged requests (lots of them!) via a google sheet.
* The requests are then triaged to produce the top candidates to work on. These top candidates are tuned into epics in Jira. Issues that are dependent on other teams are raised as tickets for the respective PM.
* The epics are then broken down into stories by the team and scheduled in the backlog.
* Bugs and tech debt stories are created and slotted directly into the backlog

(nothing too out of the ordinary)

Questions

Can the idea submission and triage be done in jira (without polluting the groomed backlog that the dev team work against)?

Can I get the Marketing team visibility on the full process at a high level (they only need to visibility at an epic level not story level) from Request list >prioritised candidates>Epics on Backlog>Epics in progress>Epics done and live (And the status of tickets that are dependent on other projects)

I am new to Jira and setting up workflows etc so the more detailed the explanation the better! Many thanks,

Tim

Tim Collins1 · Answer

Many thanks for taking the time to answer. I am struggling a bit with the filter.

I have added the custom filed to the Epics.

On the scrum board, I want to filter out all of the Epics that are not 'promoted' AND the stories that have been associated with them. Is that possible?

Nicolas Bourdages · Answer

For your first question, yes, you can do the submission and triage in JIRA without hindering the dev team. Since the suggestions, once promoted to Top Candidate, become Epics, you should enter them directly as Epics in the dev project. To promote them, simply add a custom field called Promoted, like a checkbox perhaps.

Make sure your scrum board's filter only picks up Epics that are promoted.

project = yourProject AND (issueType != Epic OR issueType = Epic AND Promoted = Yes)

For visibility, I suggest giving your marketing users a Kanban board. If your Epics use a workflow that goes Triage > In Backlog > In Progress > Done > Live, it would be easy to view. For differentiating Promoted from Unpromoted issues, use JQL swimlane.

I won't go into details on how to create a workflow, how to create a custom field and how to configure an Agile board. That's easily available in the documentation.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/configuring-workflow-185729632.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/adding-a-custom-field-185729521.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/agile/jira-agile-user-s-guide/configuring-a-board