Customer Request Thru To Roadmap Tracking

[Dan Lorentz]

We've taken the approach below to track work from customer through to execution.  However, we're pretty confident this is NOT the right way.  Trying to figure out the right way.

Our organization is heavy into research & development.  We created a Project & Plan to collect requests for new IT solutions from all over the organization.  Each directorate within the organization can see their requests within the plan.  They generate Epics right now as their requests.  These Epics have the details from the customers' perspective and are ranked in prioritized backlogs for each directorate.

The IT department takes work from these prioritized backlogs and generates items within their own Advanced Roadmaps plans/program and links the generated items back to the associated Epics from the customers.  They're required to update both their roadmap items and the linked Epics from the customers since they're merely linked.

While it works, its a bit clunky and we have to believe we just missed the right training or article on doing it better.

Recommendations from any Jira sages, ninjas, or wise-people would be greatly appreciated.

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@Dan Lorentz -

Welcome to the community.  When you mention "Customers", I am assuming that those are all users within your company and you are tracking all of your projects using just Jira and not JSM right?

From AR for Jira point of way, you may want to create the necessary issue hierarchy (i.e. creating "Initiative" issue type to be a parent of Epic issue type).  Using the hierarchy, you can then roll-up your EPICs to the initiatives from all departments.  In this case you can track all the works from all involved teams' Jira projects properly.

NOTE - Currently, the tool doesn't support "linked issue" therefore if you have issues where one using "issue links" to create the relationship association with Epics, then those issues will not be displayed in the Advanced Roadmap for Jira plans.

Hope this makes sense.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Infrastructure Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[Dan Lorentz]

Thank you, Joseph.  I had passed along your feedback to our team that was exploring this problem space.  However, I never responded to you and I apologize for that.

We recently stumbled on an Atlassian video of Jira showing how Jira used Plans to manage their projects.  It was quite useful as it wiped out several misconceptions we had with the software and highlighted how we were definitely inflicting pain and inefficiency on ourselves.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?&q=jira+advanced+roadmaps+training&view=detail&mid=DBE0C71D68977729ED72DBE0C71D68977729ED72&form=VDRVRV&ajaxhist=0

We now believe the major underlying headache we still have outstanding is how does one bring together requirements from various parts of our organization and transform them into Jira initiatives/epics/etc so they can get scored/ranked before we finally decide which to build into our roadmap for execution.  We created a custom solution within Jira previously to do this.  We want to replace it with a better one.  A group of us immediately assumed we would have to build another custom process/pipeline to our organization.  However, several of us hesitated when we heard that because last time we did that we eventually got surprised by the video above along with other bits of documentation we discovered from searching the forums and asking questions like the one you answered above.

An example:
- we have non-IT savvy directorates and IT savvy directorates.  All wish to present their requirements.  They are ranked in a prioritized backlog.  However, theses "requests" need to then be broken down into the parts that will eventually become things of different sizes which could be initiatives or epics or even little tasks (ex. one directorate's request may be a 6 month effort while another might have a script that need that takes two weeks to build.  Both see them as requests.).  The customers, which are these directorate leads, only want to know the status of their "requests" while the IT department has transformed them into Jira items in a roadmap.  We're assuming there is already a method/approach for the customers (i.e. non-IT directorates) to make their requests and track the status of their requests while the IT department transforms all that into a roadmap and tasking they can track.  The approach has been to create a custom object called a request that gets linked to actual roadmap items.  However, every time we create something "custom" we say to ourselves..."We can't be the first ones to ask for this.  We're not unique little butterflys.  If we are, we're probably doing something wrong.  Let's ask Jira."

We're just curious if there are videos or trainings showing recommended approaches to that aspect of feeding a roadmap.