Darshan Hiranandani : Practices for Adding a New Team to an Existing ART in JIRA Align During a PI

[Darshan Hiranandani]

Hi all,

I’m Darshan Hiranandani, relatively new to JIRA Align and have been self-teaching myself while responsible for implementing it for our teams. Our organization currently has about a dozen ARTs and roughly 90 teams.

Right now, I’m looking for best practices for adding a new team to an existing ART, particularly when we are already in the middle of a PI. Specifically, I’m seeking advice on how to set up the Anchor Sprints for the new team so they stay in sync with the other ART teams, given that the sprints have already been established for the current PI.

I’ve reviewed the general steps outlined in the JIRA Align documentation, but it doesn’t go into the specifics of managing the Anchor Sprints for this scenario.

Any insights or guidance on this process would be greatly appreciated!

Regards

Darshan Hiranandani

[Steve Sauser]

@Darshan Hiranandani Great question, I make some assumptions below and I call them out so if any of those are incorrect you may not have the right detail.  

New Team

• Assumption - New team would mean they are actually new, not that they are a scrum team who has been operating for some relative amount of time with sprints.  

New to the Program Team

• Assumption - The team has existed in Jira for some period of time and has been running sprints.  
  • If those Completed/Active/Future Sprints are all on cadence with the Anchor Sprints of the PI there won't be an issue, just integrate the board and the Completed Sprints will map to the Anchor Sprints in JA. 
  • If those Sprints are not on cadence then it would be advisable to create a new board for the team to use for integration.  
    • In this case only create sprints for only the current and future sprints.  

New Team operating in a manner other than Scrum (no sprints)

• Assumption - This is a team who has operated for some time, however not actually leveraging Sprints in any fashion.  
  • If they don't have a Scrum Board, create one in the appropriate Jira Project and integrate that Board.  
    • In this case create sprints for only the current and future sprints. 
  • If they do have a Scrum Board, but it has not been conformant to the cadences of the PI (Anchor Sprint Dates), then create a new board and create sprints for only the current and future sprints.  

Anchor Sprints

• Anchor sprints are set at the PI level, not the team level; this means you don't need to create any new Anchor Sprints because they already exist.  
• Ensure the team set up their Sprints on their official board to match the current/future sprints Start/End dates in concert with the PI's anchor dates.  
  • Following my assumption above, there is no need to care for the Anchor Dates of completed sprints.  

Boards

• Reusing boards that have not conformed to the appropriate PI Cadence is never advised; this will cause additional data anomalies that will need to be addressed. 
• Sprints always have an origin board (the board they were created from) - Do not use sprints that were created on a different origin board for the Team.  

 Please let us know if you have further questions on this topic.