Need advice on setting up projects

[Phil McTimoney]

Hi

I recently joined a product company and I'm looking to refactor how we are using Jira. I have used Jira in the past but the nature of my new org, plus their existing Jira use, has my wondering how best to proceed.

• We have a number of products that we sell plus a back-end web platform that is used internally and by customers.
• The products we sell can be decomposed into components: hardware, firmware, back-end platform, mobile app features.
• When we start a new product, there is a dedicated hardware design but the expectation is that we will add some features and re-use existing components: firmware, back-end platform, and mobile app.
• Our inventory of products is
  • Firmware for "gen 1" and "gen 2"
  • Mobile apps for Android and iPhone
  • Monolithic back-end platform
  • Hardware for each product (currently half-a-dozen but growing)
• Our teams are
  • Hardware
  • Firmware
  • Back-end platform
  • Mobile apps

My instinct when it comes to creating projects is to organize around the teams. They should be able to see a prioritized backlog of work, work in progress, developed work that needs testing, etc.

However, there is an org culture to be able to see what is happening at a product level. The product we sell take 6-12 months to develop as there is a hardware/manufacturing component. They like to see Gantt charts!

So I am also thinking of creating projects for each sellable product to track epics. 

That would give me

• One Jira project per sellable product
  • Use for tracking epics
  • Mostly used by 'management' for planning and status
• One Jira project per development team
  • Use for tracking stories
  • Mostly used by dev team for viewing work in progress, backlog

Does this make sense? Any feedback would be welcomed. (If nothing else...typing it out helped clarify my thoughts :) )

[G subramanyam]

Hi @Phil McTimoney welcome to the Atlassian community. This is my kind of approach. 

Set up a project with Kanban flow. This flow will have different products(Features). Underneath the features, have the epics created. Discuss these epics with the internal teams (in terms of approvals, funding, design, impact etc). Now create a new board under the main project with work flows ( design review completed, requirements written, ready for development etc). Those epics which are identified as ready for development, ask the teams to start working on them as per priority.

Project>> Features>>Epics>> (ready for development epics)>> split into stories (backlog)>> build Sprint backlog>> commit.

To summarize the above, I think of Amazon website with different categories as features>> underneath the categories are the epics>> and specific item be user stories etc.

Stay safe and stay healthy.