How to connect Management Milestones with User Stories and plan 6 months+ in Jira

Question

Hi,

I have a project for which I need to create a long term plan and link some externaly defined milestones by managment to my setup

Preconditions:

1. We have cloud instance

2. I use paraller sprints functionality (2 weeks sprints)

3. There are about 12 scrum teams for which I can have multiple future sprints created so that Story can be dragged to any future sprints for long term planning

4. Epic = Scrum Team name so that it is easy to filter backlog (User Story have mandatory Epic Link field)

5. Groups = Scrum Team

6. I use  Issue Security field to manage who can see what and who can drag items to sprints. Multiple groups can be assigned to each issue security (for managing cross domain work and for somebody who works in two or more sprints)

What I need

**I Received a list of milestones (+6 months plan) from management that are divided by dates. For each week for a particular Scrum Team I have about 2-3 Milestones (Total about 7 milestones per sprint for each Team)

**Management wants to track milestones by knowing how many user stories have been completed during each sprint for those milestones for each and every team

**I need to see User Story related to particular milestones + I want to have a good visibility of this setup (possible gantt)

I wanted to use Issue Picker Custome Field but this only work on server app. There is Big Picture or Portfolio for Jira but not sure this will help

ANY IDEAS ? :)

Thanks

Ericka Samuels · Answer

If it was me, I'd do an Epic for each milestone, and use a Team field for the Scrum team.  If you are using Tempo you get a Team field for free.  Otherwise, create a custom field.

Then, put the Epic and its children stories on your backlog and use either an Agile or Kanban board to get them into sprints,

You can use artificial tasks in BigPicture, but keep in mind they do not feed back into JIRA.

If it was me, I'd rather have all of my project structure instantiated in JIRA, and then use custom fields and filters to bring it into BigPicture for visualization.

If you do not yet have BigPicture (which I use and I love) this would still work with a native Agile board in JIRA.  The Kanban boards also let you customize swim lanes, so you could do one lane for each Team.

Radosław (SoftwarePlant) · Answer

Hi Piotr,

It seems like your milestones could be managed by using the Gantt module of our BigPicture plugin and the structure built on artificial tasks. It will show you milestones with their stories indented underneath. For reporting you can use aggregation on the artificial tasks. If you want to display customfields on Gantt just add them to your columns in the perspectives menu.

Please remember that you can always ask any questions concerning configuration or functionality using our customer portal.

You are always welcome to join our weekly webex to get a hands on experience how our plugin can help you manage your projects.

Radosław of SoftwarePlant