Company dependency board

[Adrian Arama]

Hello all, 

I'm trying to find a way in which I could leverage the Kanban board functionality in Jira Work Management product, so that I can display tasks that have cross-team/department dependencies. Therefore, I need to assign these tasks to certain departments (not users) in the first place because my intend is to create a collaboration space between departments. From there, users can individually assign tasks to themselves. 

For example: the sales team is drafting the offer for a certain product/service, and they depend on the specialist input to draft the final offering. Each department works in their own group mailbox and I want to offer them a possibility to display only the tasks where one team depends on another team's input. This way they could prioritize tasks for which other colleagues are depending on.

Q1 - What should I use to group users from the same department, so that I can assign tasks to this collection of users? "Teams" or "Groups" ?

Q2 - Can I assign different colored labels to this tasks?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Adrian Arama 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

While the Team field can be added to the screens for issues in a JWM project, it is not available to add to the columns of the List view nor is it available to use in the Filters option.

In my quick testing it also appears that it is not possible to add a Group Picker field to the List view or use such in the Filters option.

It does appear to be possible to add a custom Selection/Dropdown list to the List view and use such in the Filters option. So that seems to be the option you can use. Unfortunately that will not have any digital link to a group of users.

That only gives you the ability to filter the tasks based on the group to which they are "assigned".

How do you note that group A's task is depending on something from group B? Are you going to use a second field to note the group upon whom the task depends? Or will you create another task for group B, and create a link between group A's task and group B's task?

[Adrian Arama]

Hello Trudy, 

Thanks a lot for the quick answer and for the worm welcome.

The idea is to implement this simple Kanban board only for the tasks that are needing input from more than one department, therefore only tasks with dependencies. Rest of the tasks can be easily handled through the mail management system we use, (although I have to admit Google Workspace is not the best option in the world).

Purpose is to have a view company-wide on the possible delays/bottlenecks within the company and also offer transparency to senior management.
 

For this purpose, I would need something that stands out on the respective task, through which members of certain departments could easily identify tasks that are addressed to their team/department and assign them to themselves through a pull-system. 
The closest thing I found so far is the label feature but unfortunately this is not customizable (color-wise, to help with spotting the right tasks to the right people easily).

I've tried the dropdown feature and it works but only for later filtering purposes. Would you know something that would help with the visualization of tasks in the board? Or do you know any way that I can customize the labels?

Thanks again!

[Trudy Claspill]

There doesn't appear to be any native method available for set a color for a Label value.

However, for each team you could create an Epic in the project, and add the tasks for that team as children of that Epic.

You can then set the color of the Epic.

And add the Epic Link to the card display. That will show the Epic Name with the color you specified for the Epic.

Another alternative is to leverage a Kanban board made from the Jira Software product features. In an Software project board is is possible to set a color band on the left side of each card. This option is not available in JWM project boards. But, if you also have the Jira Software product installed on your site, and if you are able to grant Jira Software user licenses to the users who need to work with the board, then you could create a Kanban board from a Saved Filter that selects the JWM project issues. Then you could implement card coloring in that second board.