Do 3 Operational Value Streams Require 3 Workflows in a Jira Project for 3 Kanban Boards?

[James Anderson]

My colleague has an existing Jira project which captures work from their various customers (about 25 of them) that falls into 1 of their 3 Operational Value Streams (OVS).  We use the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).  Their Jira project has Jira Issue Types:  Story, Feature, and ART Epic.  They designed their Features gigantic, like 12 months of work.  Thus, the work flowing across their Kanban will be really big Stories.

My colleague desires to have 3 Kanban boards to track progression of the work across whichever OVS is relevant to the work being performed.  Each Story will have a Component entry indicating which among the 3 OVS it falls under.  Each OVS has:  The triggering step, its various phases (about 4 or 5), then the final delivery of value.  An extra category of "On Hold" is desired, since that sometimes happens.

My thinking is that each Kanban will use my colleague's customers as the swim lanes and the OVS's phases as the columns.  Large Stories will flow across its respective Kanban board.

Any thoughts from the community about the best approach to do this?  There probably are a few options, but I suspect that 3 Kanban boards will need to go into a single separate consolidated Jira project, since in it there would be 3 separate workflows for 3 separate OVS.  I am sure someone must have done this before.

[Josh Costella · Accepted solution]

Hi @james_r_anderson 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

For your use case, I would consider the following:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Align-articles/Thoughts-on-the-quot-best-quot-structure-in-Jira-to-integrate/ba-p/2250401
• https://help.jiraalign.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000152674-Jira-Align-organizational-structure

TL;DR: Jira project per Agile Release Train. Utilize the Team field to build boards for each development team within the ART Jira project. 

FYI: I did not provide links to that information in order to sell you on the idea of Jira Align. Whether you decide to utilize that product someday or not, this is still the ideal structure for setting up Jira with SAFe. However, building and tracking a true SAFe configuration in Jira becomes a challenge OOTB as you mature and add more architecture and process. But it all starts with how you organize the day-to-day work. 

[James Anderson]

Thanks Josh, this is helpful.  We have indeed been begging our management for Jira Align for several years.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM · Accepted solution]

Hi @james_r_anderson 

To achieve this, you do not need to have three different workflows. You usually only want different workflows if each "OVS" has its own process that would require a different workflow. If they do have different processes, then yes I would start with different issues types each with it's own workflow.

Boards are defined by a filter, as long as you have something in the different "OVS" that you can filter on, you can have them all in the same project and all use the same issuetype.  For example, you could have an "OVS Type" field and use that to filter on for the three boards.

[James Anderson]

Thank you for your response Shawn.  Yes, each of the three OVS are quite different.  The Stories that will flow through them will have a component entry designating which among the 3 OVS that the particular Story will be flowing through.