Strategies for stack ranking projects?

[daniel_etra]

One of the main things preventing us from switching over to adopt Atlas for project tracking from a basic confluence page is the ability to stack rank projects in the view in Atlas.

As a product team, we use stack ranking almost everywhere to give visual queues about relative priority. In Atlas, we might have over 20 projects/epics we want to manage at any given time. I see how to sort the list of projects by things like dates, names, etc. But what I really want is to put these projects into a specific, stack ranked list. 

My "hack" for this was to update the project names so that they could be sorted alphabetically. But this is super messy. And also messes with the linkage to JIRA epics. 

How are other people solving for this in Atlas? How are you reflecting the relative priority of projects in your atlas views?

[Andrej Freeze _ greenique · Accepted solution]

I understand your interest in ranking projects and goals within Atlas. It's a natural desire to want to prioritize our work effectively. However, Atlas isn't designed with this specific feature in mind. Its primary focus is on sharing progress updates and showing connections, which are valuable in their own right.

While prioritization is undoubtedly important, introducing it into Atlas might create some challenges. For instance, we'd need to consider how to manage linked projects when priorities shift, and how to keep these rankings in sync with other tools we use like Jira.

That said, I appreciate your thinking about this. For now, it might be most effective to continue using Jira for prioritization and rankings. This way, we can leverage Atlas for its strengths in communication and dependency tracking, while relying on Jira for task management and prioritization.

Remember, Atlas still offers great value by allowing team members to subscribe to updates they care about, keeping everyone informed on project progress. Let's focus on using each tool for its intended purpose to maximize our productivity and collaboration.

[daniel_etra]

Hi Andrej -- Thanks for this reply. I am supportive of using tools for their intended purpose. And... I think a feature in atlas that lets users sort views by custom fields would be a possible way to address this use case (currently you can only sort by a fixed set of core attributes). If that existed, I could use a custom field to manage my display priority.

[Frank Voss]

Hello, you can rank projects in Advanced Roadmaps in Jira to give you the view you want.  You can also rank them in Jira Product Discovery which is completely customizable. Hope this helps.

[daniel_etra]

Hi Frank -- Thanks for replying!

I am aware of - and we use - ranking in both Roadmaps and JPD.

We want to start using Atlas for team updates and higher-level, narrative tracking of active work-streams. If we are going to use any of the atlas project list views to help non-technical users monitor progress on key initiatives, it's important that they be displayed in the order of business priority. That is what I am looking to do within Atlas directly.