Create shared services teams in Jira Align

[#1]

Some enterprises may have teams that provide value to other teams across many programs in a portfolio. You may want to represent these teams as centralized shared services teams in Jira Align.

Create a shared service team structure

To represent a shared service team as a centralized team, you should create a new program to encompass the shared services team. Then, create the shared services team as a Kanban team under the new program to represent the work the team does. This setup is the easiest to maintain, and the lightest weight to put into practice, especially if you’re using a connector to integrate Jira Align and Jira Software.

Note: When configuring the shared services team (and all Kanban teams) in Jira Align, be sure to set a normalized story size/LOE to help with consistent metrics in the Work in Process report and other reports that tie time and Kanban together.

Once you generate anchor sprints for the shared services and the other program teams, the other programs can then create dependencies on the shared services team. The shared services team and other programs can track the statuses of these dependencies on dependency maps, the Program Room, and the Program Board.

Track demand capacity with a shared services team

For shared services teams that interact on a more regular, planned basis with other teams, you can use a combination of Kanban and Agile teams to keep track of the team from an additional demand capacity perspective. Just add team members from the shared services team to the Agile teams that usually request the work, so that they’re on multiple teams. This reduces cross-program dependencies, allows for capacity reporting, and improves program predictability.

Once the shared services members have been added to the necessary Agile teams, allocations need to be set on those Agile teams to show how those users’ time is being consumed.

[Sam Tsubota]

@Emily Koch since Kanban boards don’t have sprints in Jira and as a result iterations won’t be created through the Jira Connector, will iterations need to be manually generated in Jira Align for Shared Services teams?

[Emily Koch]

@Sam Tsubota Great question! Because you'd be creating the shared service team as a Kanban team, you wouldn't need to generate iterations/sprints for the team at all. The work for Kanban teams is driven off of PIs, rather than sprint assignment.

@Tim Keyes wrote a great article about how syncing kanban teams from Jira Software to Jira Align works. There, you can find more detailed best practices on how to sync Kanban boards from Jira with Kanban teams in Jira Align!

[Mike Hall]

Shared Services teams can be Kanban or Scrum.

[Michael Holian]

@Emily Koch - When you have multiple Share services teams, what may be the advantages / disadvantages of setting them up as separate programs vs. setting them up as separate teams under a single program?