How do you distinguish between greenlighting ideas, and approved tasks?

[Lars H]

Often we need to capture an idea, or a felt need, without yet knowing whether the idea will actually be worked on, or by whom. How do we capture and track those ideas, yet keep them separate from tasks that are approved to be worked on? E.g.

• Maybe they're not approved tasks unless they're assigned to somebody? In that case, how do you represent that a decision has been made to implement the idea, but the decision about who will do it hasn't been made yet?
• Do you use a special status, or a special issue type, to represent this?
• Do you put ideas in a separate JIRA project from approved tasks?

This is something I've wondered about for years, as I've used JIRA. I'm wondering both,

1. Is there an official, intended way to do this in JIRA, that I've just missed? and
2. How do other organizations that use JIRA handle this need?

[Bhushan Nagaraj]

Two different scenarios that I have seen in my experience, both of which you have touched on but just adding my 2 cents.

Firstly, I believe Idea and Task should be easily distinguishable and hence be of different issue types.

1. Global project to collect all ideas and votes: Have a dedicated project to encourage all team members to submit ideas with an issue type Idea. Use Component as a mandatory field to sub-categorize ideas. Encourage your team members to use the voting feature to identify ideas that really align with your goals and strategies.
2. Build it into the workflow: An Idea can be a very simple issue type. A summary and description is all that is required. Build a workflow that starts with "Ideation" status. Once approved, move to Open state and optionally, change the issue type using script runner or manually before it moves to "Open" state.

[Lars H]

Thank you, this is helpful. If you have an "Ideation" status, don't you think it would be redundant to have an "Idea" issue type, since you could easily distinguish ideas from tasks by their status?

[Bhushan Nagaraj]

Think about issue creation. It will be misleading to the user if they are just submitting an idea but they need to create a task. Depending on your org, you can handle this with training but user experience wise, it is much clearer for users submitting ideas to create an Idea issue type.