What is the best way to manage multiple projects (12) across 3 teams/backlogs?

[kevin yanders]

Hello!  I am a SM with some Jira experience but previously had an administrator who took care of setting up our environments.  I now have 3 teams working in 3 backlogs across approx. 12 projects for a large company.  We have members who do not like the current set up and would like to have better visibility into each project independently.  They suggested a separate board for each project but we all can agree that would be messy in many ways.  Looking for more potential ways to solve this dilemma than I currently have the Jira knowledge to do so with and have not found a thread on this particular topic.  Thanks!

[John Funk]

Hi @Christine Nguyen  - There's a lot going on there! And without being in the middle of it, it is hard to suggest exactly what you should do. But here are some thoughts in general. 

I prefer to set things up by working team. Not a team as in Accounting or Legal or Marketing or whatever. But the team actually working on the product. This tends to be marketers, designers, developers, testers, content writers, etc. So, for you that might be the Sprint team. Or it might be that various people are working on various different sprints at the same time. I don't think that's a good way to do it, but to each his own. 

For portfolio level stuff, you should really be using a portfolio program, whether that be an add-on app or whatever works best for you. For Jira Cloud that would mean getting a Premium subscription and using Advanced Roadmaps. But since you are on Server, that would be the program there. But you will need to go to Cloud or Data Center in the next year, so you should really setup your Jira stuff based on where you are migrating to. 

I hope that helps a little. 

[John Funk]

Hi Kevin,

I would have a separate project for each team. Then you can create a single board for all of the projects worked on by that team. 

Then you can add quick filters by project to the board so that each team member can simple click on the filter for that project to hide the remaining fields. 

[kevin yanders]

I had thought about just filtering by team?

[kevin yanders]

After re-reading your comment, I believe this is what we are currently doing now.  The issue is....This PE is wanting a different jira project for each project and then how do we combine them in a way that is feasible and manageable at a team level combining the multiple projects/Jira projects into a single board/backlog?

[John Funk]

What's their push for separate projects? What is that buying them? How are you keeping them separate now - with components? 

You could combine them on a board easy enough with the board filter looking something like:

project in (ABC, DEF, 123, 456)

to include all of the projects. 

[kevin yanders]

He thinks it will give him better focused visibility into each project individually?

[John Funk]

I guess I would ask him what he is not getting now that having them as separate projects would get him. Then you can work from there to satisfy the need. 

[kevin yanders]

Thanks for the information.

[Christine Nguyen]

@John Funk  read your comments and I have follow up questions which I really appreciate for any insight or recommendation.

we have 7 business teams each has their own sets of projects and their projects often cross teams, cross division and work with different vendors. The projects may have different project managers assigned to it and they may run their projects on different sprint start date and duration.  Kinda complicated business structure and functions.

Management team wants to pull all of this and set it up in Jira so that they have one portfolio view of projects and capacity utilization.

I set up Jira by business teams, use custom field to tag the project within each team as their work stream. For example, 1 project for the accounting team, as they create epic or story, they selects the work stream that the epic/story is belong to.  My thought is to use board to pull in all works a team has across different Jira projects or boards (not yet try this out)

Now I got hung up on how to to solve the issue of having different PM running their projects having different sprint start date and duration.

Any suggestion? Is there a better ways to set up Jira project than what I have currently have? How to handle the issue of different variations of Sprint start and duration that each assigned PM running their projects (aka work stream in my Jira setup for each BU team)?