JIRA Status Conflict with Kanban Boards

[graham.pinnock]

There is a trade off between having too many status and workflows in an organisation vs having flexibility for teams to use things like Kanban boards in a way that suits them. When agile becomes prescriptive the benefits are lost, but when it is too open enterprise control is lost. I want to flex how many columns and swim lanes I need to manage the work within my team, but this is tightly linked to the number of status made available in JIRA by our admin. Is there any way to de-couple status from boards so projects can define the Kanban boards independently of the number of status. Currently project teams use workarounds that devalue the workflows, like redefining the status with a different column name in a Kanban board, or worse everything is done outside of JIRA, and updates copy pasted in. Any ideas how to appease both sides?  

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @graham.pinnock , thanks for your question.

I wonder if you had thought about team-managed projects for this. For company-managed projects, things like board and workflow configurations are centralized, meaning they are more uniform, but also leaves less room for flexibility and difference in approach.

If you allowed for some users or teams to try using team-managed projects, these are much more flexible, in terms of allowing to add your own columns and custom fields as and when they are needed. 

You can check out an article here that highlights the big differences between the two types of projects - What are team-managed and company-managed projects? | Jira Work Management Cloud | Atlassian Support. 

Let me know your thoughts and hopefully others can also offer up some suggestions.

Cheers

[graham.pinnock]

Hi Valerie, 

My organisation is transitioning from Teams Managed Projects to Company Managed Projects. In doing so we gain control but lose flexibility.

For most areas in JIRA this is fine, but it really limits the Kanban Boards. If JIRA allowed Company Managed Status that filter down to the individual project boards for control, but also allowed projects to assign child status to Company managed ones to use on the project to fill in the gaps that would for me be a great feature.

Does not sound like this is possible currently?

Cheers   

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @graham.pinnock , thanks for your message.

I am not sure I understand your question.

In a company managed project, you can still give some more permission to team leaders or the project lead, for example, by making them a project administrator and board administrator. In this way, a person with both permissions, could* add a new status to the kanban board. I put the asterisk because you also need to be using a simplified workflow, and not one that you have already customized.

I think it might be beneficial for you or someone in your organization to do some more training in how the Jira software projects are set up to work, how you can customize them but also how to manage the demand for change so that you have a stable but flexible system. 

Do you know about the Atlassian University? I think working towards this certification or just looking at a few of the prep courses could be helpful - ACP-620 Managing Jira Projects for Cloud Certification : Atlassian

Cheers

[graham.pinnock]

Thanks for the course recommendation. I think Nic nailed it in the below comment. But it is a shame that what I want to do cannot be done.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

No, the "status in column" thing is the entire point of a Kanban (or Scrum) board.

If you're finding people are doing things outside Jira, then it's most likely that your Jira is not set up to match their real-life processes.  If you fix that (by "flexing the columns and swimlanes" as you say you want to), then your problem will go away.

[graham.pinnock]

Hi Nic,

In my organisation they are reducing the number of available status to 5 which will be controlled by a central admin team. This limits all Kanban boards to having 5 columns/swimlanes. I'm looking for an option I can take to the admin team, that supports both needs. 

I don't think Jira can support this, so the answer may be it is not possible.  But if it is not possible then what is the best way to Manage Projects Centrally without losing the benefits of using Kanban Boards. 

It is a trade off between the two options, "company managed projects" or "teams managed projects". It would be great if JIRA had a hierarchy that could filter down, but to my knowledge this doesn't exist.

Would love to know if there are any alternative approach's that could work.

Cheers

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you're doing central administration of status like that, then you're no longer agile - the teams cannot self-organise, and you are throwing away some of the power of self-managed Kanban.

There's no way to decouple anything here - boards and status are a function of each other, there's no other way to do it.

[graham.pinnock]

Thanks, this is what I have said to my colleagues, your comments are very useful :)