Single portfolio team with multiple boards

Question

Hi,

I believe this is a portfolio limitation, but would appreciate confirmation of this, and any suggested best practices.

I am trying to use shared teams, e.g. with testing resources in the Test Team and development resources in the Dev Team. This feels like a logical use of shared teams.

A single Portfolio Plan has its Issue Sources set to 2 different boards, because the portfolio plan is tracking a single business project that requires a synchronised release of 2 different applications, both with their own JIRA project and board.

I need the ability to assign issues from either board to members of a single shared team.

But when adding a Shared Team to the Portfolio Plan, I have to associate one single board to that team.  This makes it impossible for a single member of a shared team to be assigned to issues from different JIRA projects / boards.  I hope I am missing something obvious because this feels like a very significant limitation.

The only workaround that I can see is to create a single consolidated board that includes issues from both JIRA projects that are relevant to my Portfolio Plan, and then point the Plan at that single board. This does not feel entirely practical.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy

Andrew Whelan · Answer

Hi @Walter Buggenhout,

Thank you for your answer, this works exactly as you say - but the result is that an issue assigned to a shared team member cannot be allocated to a JIRA sprint in the portfolio scope view, unless the shared team is associated with the board on which that sprint appears.

If an issue is already allocated to a JIRA Sprint, then when I assign it to the shared team member, portfolio removes the sprint value and places it in a 'virtual' sprint that exists in the Portfolio Plan but not in any JIRA board.

Interestingly when I commit my changes, in JIRA the issue DOES appear in the original sprint, assigned to the shared team member.

So I now have a single issue which appears in 1 sprint in JIRA, and appears in a different sprint in Portfolio. If I want to push it back a sprint, I cannot do this in Portfolio, I can only do it in JIRA. In Portfolio the 'Sprint' value is locked.

As an aside, the virtual sprints that portfolio has created don't line up with my JIRA sprint cadence, the portfolio sprints run for 2 weeks from Friday to Thursday, while my JIRA sprints run from Saturday to Friday.

I must be missing something and I would really appreciated any further advice, we're quite new to portfolio and just trying to establish the best ways of working with it.

Thanks,

Andy

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Andrew Whelan,

Assigning a team to a board in Portfolio does not make it impossible for a single member of a shared team to be assigned to issues from different JIRA projects / boards.

If you want to assign a team member from a different team to an issue, you will have to change the team responsible for that specific issue manually. And then assign the team member of that team to the issue.

So step by step:

* In scope view find the issue you want to assign to a specific member of a different team
* Change the team to the team your desired assignee belongs to
* Then assign the assignee to the issue