Managing split resources on a project

Question

Hello,

I am a Scrum Master for the Bank. I have a core team that I help day to day and I am also managing an enterprise wide project utilizing the scrum set up in JIRA. I am wondering how best to utilize JIRA from a  project perspective. All the of the technical resources dedicated to the project are split and are also on core teams. The teams are not cross functional here so their work can be done independently.

Right now I have them managing project work on the project board but some of the teams would like to see that project work on their team boards and track it that way. Is there anyway to do this besides asking the other SM's to filter my board on to their board?

To complicate things further not every team is scrum so my sprint cycle would not match up if we did this. I know we can also go the route where we create stories on team specific boards and link them to the project. However, then each time we update the ticket we need to move the tickets on both boards. I am hoping there is something that will work that I am not aware of. I need to track the project work but would like the project related work to funnel to the team specific boards.

Jack Brickey · Answer

@Megan Hicks, first let's keep the discussion in one thread by using the "Reply" rather than "Answer button.

It is at times difficult to convey best practices in a thread. if I were viewing your instance I might better understand. With that said...

If I have a number of separate projects/boards that ultimately I want to monitor collectively I create a kanban board that encompasses everything I want to see. Now "everything" needs to be defined by you as the program manager for example my 'Master Board' might be governed by one of the following filter examples:

* project in (A, B, C, D)
* project in (A, B, C, D) and Component not in (1, 7, 8)

Now if we look at your IT example below, you mention they have two boards (project board and core team board). I'm assuming these are simply two kanban boards. You can easily replace these two with a single kanban board if you want. To do that look at the two board filters and combine that filter into one, save it, share it, and create a new kanban board using that saved filter.

If I'm going in circles and not helping I'm sorry. I'm just trying to translate you question into Jira terms as best I can.

Megan Hicks · Answer

Hello-

I'm not sure that this answers my question. We already have boards at a per team basis. On top of this we have project boards for enterprise wide projects. How would I manage the status of a enterprise wide project if I have user stories on multiple team's boards? I want to be able to see how the project is coming along clearly at any given time.  IT Resources that are on this project are also on core teams (Split). Each of those core teams either runs Kanban or Scrum (from a JIRA perspective). Right now they are forced to manage their work on 2 boards (the project board and the core team board).  Is there anyway to make this easier for them? I think what I am hearing you say is, given the architecture of the teams, what we are doing is the best we can do. Please let me know if I am not understanding.

Jack Brickey · Answer

@Megan Hicks, it feels to me like what you are wanting is to satisfy different people w/ different needs. Assuming so, at a high level I recommend you simply allow different parties/teams to manage their work in the manner that best suits them by creating boards at a per-person/per-team basis. For example:

You may want a kanban board that captures all issues across all projects.

Dev group 1 might want a scrum board for only their team's issues and run sprints

Dev group 2 might want a kanban w/ only their team's issues

etc.

Now the one thing you will not be able to easily overcome is to have a single scrum board covering all projects/issues if some teams are not scrumming. It just doesn't work. That is why I suggest a kanban board as the "this is what the team is working on now" view. The backlog for the master kanban would contain: issues not in a sprint for the scrum projects and not "in progress" for the non-scrum projects. The down side here is that issues are simply going to pop up on the master board whenever the non-scrum team moves an issue to IP.

Not sure that helps but hope so. Cheers!