I want to use Jira for task management for a small team (with many tasks), what's the best solution?

[Amanda S]

Help! Bare with me, while i try to explain my situation. I work as a Strategic Coordinator with the Product Portfolio of my company. I work in a small team of three Strategists and we have been using MS planner and such, but it's not giving us the overview we would like with dependencies, details and so on.

So, I was given Jira, and the task of setting up a workspace for my team. I've watched a few tutorials and read some articles to try to educate myself in the system. But I'm lost on where to start and what would be the most effective setup, longterm, when working with various projects with their own timelines and tasks to follow-up. For example we could be part of 3 different product development projects simultaniously, all while we also run our own processes for longterm portfolio strategies, market analysis and so on.  

I know I want to have them all on the same board to be able to get a good overview of the workload and tasks ahead. So my question is, should I make each Project an "Epic" and each task a "story" with subtasks for example "Project X" where I have to do 1) A business case; 2) A launch plan; 3)  Coordinate a product presentation. Then for "1) Business case" , I have subtasks like a) Forecast; b) Pricing strategy; c) Project Cost Calculations... And we could have up to 7 of these processes going at the same time.

So I need it to be a structured overview. Is Epics and "Stories" the way to go, or is there a better way? All help and ideas/tips for a newbie to this workspace are welcome! 

/Amanda

[Josh Costella · Accepted solution]

Hi @Amada Sörum 

I'm not sure what license level you have, but if you are using Jira Premium, you have access to create projects using the Top-level planning template. This allows you to monitor work from multiple projects and utilize a Plan view with gantt-style timeline charts. 

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/top-level-planning

Otherwise, I would recommend that each project be represented in its own Jira project. You can share the same schemes across the projects so that each one has the same issue types, workflows, fields, etc. This will take a bit of configuration work initially but once it is done, you will have minimal overhead in the future. 

Using Epics is a good way to break down large pieces of work. Think of the Epic as a large deliverable for a particular project and then you can create child Tasks of that Epic to break the work down in manageable chunks. You can use Stories if you'd like but I tend to recommend that operations/business teams utilize Tasks. It keeps it simple. 

You can use Epics to represent a Project like you mentioned. But you will need to make sure that each team knows and can see their specific work. Having all the work in a singular Jira project and requiring multiple teams to work out of it requires more complex filters for boards. 

Does this help?

[Matt Parks]

To piggyback on this, I would only recommend grouping by Epics if you expect that those Epics will eventually be completed and you will no longer do any work on them.

Based on your description, it sounds like your Epics have a finite amount of work, in which case that is probably the better way of doing it for the reasons that Josh listed above.

There are many ways to determine what constitutes a Jira Project. As long as you remain consistent with your reasoning when creating new projects, you should be OK.

[Amanda S]

Thank you for your input, this helps me get started on what to read up on and how I could set things up. I might land in doing a bit of a combination of both, where I will create a new project for the more long-term strategic work and then keep all the smaller product projects in one overview (Project), where those Epics, as you said, are more likely to be completed and in the more long-term project, things may move along a bit slower. Therefore, making it clear what's expected in each process, if that makes sense.

I will look up what account I have and make sure the company issues me with a premium package, thanks for the suggestion.