How Can I Migrate Asana Projects to JIRA To Manage Them In Scrum Teams

[Didem Aksaray]

Hi Everyone,

Currently we use Asana and we have 20 separate projects. We'd like to move into Agile (Scrum) and use JIRA. I'm not sure if we have the Premium version of JIRA or not.

We'll create 4 Scrum teams to look after specific projects. For instance;

• Team A - Project 1, Project 2
• Team B - Project 3, Project 4, Project 5

When we migrate our projects from Asana to JIRA, what would be the best configuration to accommodate this structure in Scrum? 

Some alternatives came to my mind are:

1. Each project in Asana can become an Epic in JIRA. We can use the term Project in JIRA to collate each Team's works. We can distinguish projects through Epics on the Scrum board. 

• Asana Team Name --> JIRA Project
• Asana Project --> JIRA Epic (Epics are tracked in Project)

2. If we migrate each project from Asana to JIRA - I mean each project can become a Project in JIRA as well. Is there any way to build a collateral Scrum view for each team? I heard of Plans, Top Level Planning, Cross Team Planning, which are confusing to me - can we use one of them to have a Scrum view?

Thanks.

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Didem Aksaray and welcome to the Community!

This is always a difficult type of question to answer in a Q&A forum, since a lot depends on how your teams are structured, how big and complex your projects are, how experienced your teams are with agile methodologies and how this will grow / evolve in the future. There is definitely no on-size-fits-all answer and you can be quite sure that the way you work today will have changed over time as well.

What I can confidently say is that your idea to organise work around the teams who will be handling it, is a good mindset. Scrum boards in Jira help you collect the work for a single team in a single place so a single source of truth emerges to plan and track what is happening in that team. If your teams work in isolation, than it is quite easy to split their work in separate Jira projects per team. Challenges become bigger when multiple teams need to collaborate on the same project / product / process. Then, it will start to make more sense to create Jira projects for these projects / products / processes and assign the work in there to the executing teams. As boards can pull in data from multiple projects, you can still work this out nicely.

The plans, cross team planning and other items you mention in your last paragraph are part of Jira's premium plan and come in when you want to create overview and high level roadmaps across your 4 teams. But make sure you get the basics right for your separate teams first before you take that next step. In general, when you got these basics right, glueing it together will be much easier than if you don't.

A good source of background information I'd like to refer to is Atlassian's Agile Coach microblog site. It has some good agile tutorials on there. Not saying that Atlassian is the reference when it comes to agile, but it does combine tools and practices to achieve better results. 

Hope this helps!