Project Request Management/Parking Lot

[David Carruthers]

I am new to my company and am in the process of developing out a PMO for our various business needs. That being said, our current process for recording, tracking, reviewing, decisioning, and actioning project requests is clunky. Current process is as follows; 

1) log ticket with Service Now and assign to the PMO

2) PMO receives Service Now ticket and enters request into sharepoint (with sharepoint acting as our parking lot)

3) once a requested project is approved it is moved into Jira Software project with all appropriate information

I wish to reduce the amount of copying and pasting and to exclude Sharepoint entirely from the process. What is the best project type board to do this? I would want a backlog to be used as a parking lot, and I will build a custom workflow for the project approval process. 

What is the best project type for this? 

[Rachel Wright]

Hi @David Carruthers ,

Plenty of us use Jira in this way, to track the entire process from conception to completion.  And you're right, duplicating or manually moving data is no fun.  I'd suggest starting with Jira's "Project Management" project template and then customizing the settings from there.  

Here's how to do it:

1. Login as a Jira application administrator
2. Click the "cog" or "gear" icon on the top right and select "Projects" from the admin menu
3. Click the "Create project" button at the top right
4. Click "Work management" in the left sidebar, select the "Project management" template, and click the "Use template" button
5. Finally, give the project a long name, like "Project Management", a short key, like "PMO" and select a team (optional.)

The "Project Management" template comes with a board.  It also includes a default workflow of: To Do, In Progress, and Done.  You might want to expand that to include some prioritization steps.  But of course, keep the workflow as short as possible.

You might also want to add the "Epic" issue type to the "Issue Type Screen Scheme".  I know "Epic" is a typically software term, but it provides a nice grouping ability for your tasks and initiatives.  Epics are not an official hierarchy level, but I like to think of Tasks as "parents", Sub-tasks as "children", and Epics as "grandparents."

Hope this helps!

Rachel Wright
Author, Jira Strategy Admin Workbook