Best Practices for Tracking Priorities

[Zach Rabin]

Hi,

I'm working on putting together a board to track the priority of initiatives across the company. The team that will be setting and reviewing this prioritization on a regular basis wants to be able to see them laid out by team. I can do this by creating an Epic per team, however it leaves an issue that I haven't been able to solve. There are a number of initiatives that require multiple teams to work on them.

For example, initiative A might be priority #1 for Team X, and priority #3 for Team Y. I need to be able to show each team's priority list within a single board, but other than creating multiple cards for a single initiative, which is just going to make the board cluttered and confusing, I haven't come up with another way of displaying this.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Zach

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi Zach,

This is an interesting problem to solve.  It seems like you need a way to create an additional level of hierarchy in JIRA. This article may help:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/jira-software-evaluator-resources/jira-software-hierarchy

Another simple way you could use is: you can create a dedicated project for initiatives where each initiative corresponds to the whole effort company-wide. The issue type could be 'initiative' e.g. (you need to create it). Then each team creates epics with their part of the work and links the epics to the corresponding 'initiative' in the project you created for initiatives.  Then you can create a filter that shows all the epics linked to initiatives(and grouped by initiative).

Hope it helps,

Carlos

[Deleted user]

Welcome to the Community @Zach Rabin!

I was going to recommend Portfolio: you're one step ahead of me here :-)

[Zach Rabin]

@Jonny Adams For now, the only workable option I could find was to create duplicate cards, one for each team. All of the other options, other than purchasing Portfolio didn't give us what we need. If I ever find a different solution, I'll come back and update this thread.

[Jonny Adams]

@Zach Rabin Another idea is to add components for each of your teams. You could then create quick filters on your board (under board configuration) for each team Component making it easier to flip between teams while remaining on the same board.

Next you could add the "Labels" field to your issues. Teams could use condensed labels. For instance Team X could use Xp1, Xp2, and Xp3 while Team Z uses Zp1, Zp2, and Zp3. The sort would be thrown off for Team Z if Team X had declared a label, but this would prevent you from having to create individual issues for each team. You can display components and labels on cards in your board using card layout under board configuration.

Good luck. Please let us know how you end up tackling this feat.