Will Parallel Sprints Help?

[Edward Nelson]

Hi, I have a unique requirement and wonder if parallel sprints would address.

I have three teams in different backlogs.

One team supports infrastructure needs of the other 2 app teams. Infra team also has their own non-app related backlog of tickets as well.

I want to have the 2 app teams create stories or subtasks to be worked on by the infrastructure team in their projects..

Infra people attend and report their status in the app team ceremonies.

The lead eng for the infrastructure team wants to see the tickets from the other two projects on his infra board.

The teams start and end sprints on 3 different days of the week with the infra team being last (Tues, Wed, and Thurs) every two weeks.

By using  a custom field designed for the infra team (App Project radio button) I can pull in the app ticket on the infra board with the filter.

The Problem: Since the app team's sprints start before the Infra sprint, I can't seem to move the Infra sprint(in the infra backlog) to the top to be able to start the sprint.

Would Parallel Sprints help in this case? 

[Sebastian Krzewiński]

Hi @Edward Nelson 

As I understand all teams work on the same project and board right? In that case parallel sprints will solve this issue and in one backlog you will be able to see 2 or more active sprints and be sure what tickets are inside sprints.

Regards,

Seba

[Edward Nelson]

Hi, no - each team is in a separate project with three different backlogs. 

[John Dunkelberg]

@Edward Nelson one thing to look out for (which has made us not want to use parallel sprints) is that this is a global setting, so turning it on will solve this for these three teams, but it may cause confusion for the other teams working in your instance.  If you have a smaller organization, that may not be a problem.

That said, I've often mused on whether we should reconsider our decision on parallel sprints.  We made that call when we got started with Jira in 2017 and all the teams in the org were inexperienced with Jira and had a tendency to define their board queries too loosely.

[Edward Nelson]

Thank you - that is one concern I have is how it will affect the other unrelated projects that are not following this model.

Could you elaborate on the effects of parallel sprint enable on the oter teams that only have their backlog and sprint?

[John Dunkelberg]

@Edward Nelson - sorry for replying in a new thread, for some reason the forum won't let me reply to your reply.

On the parallel sprints, my concern has been more a matter of discipline.  We have quite a bit of work that is certainly not textbook dedicated agile teams, where someone might be contributing in multiple areas.  If (as an admin) I let people go parallel, will we find that every project suddenly has dozens of boards because people make a "My Work Sprint Board" which includes all stories that they're assignees of, or have some label, or are in one of three projects that they think "oh I want to keep an eye on that."  So hopefully not as much a problem as users get more experienced, but I'm looking at a user base of 7000 so it wouldn't take too many "bad actors" to have things get chaotic.

We already have a good bit of that from people making Kanban boards, but at least those won't crowd the UI in the same way.  And unfortunately Jira doesn't have any tools for chasing down boards based on inactivity or the like.

[Edward Nelson]

Thanks. John. I appreciate the insight.