How do you Organize / Priorite Projects / Epics in Jira

bbryan September 19, 2017

We're looking to see if Jira would be a good fit for our IT Department, consists of 4 teams: Ops, Dev, Business Analysts, and Helpdesk Team (they already have a helpdesk so for them this is just for their projects/tasks, not looking at Jira Service Desk now, but maybe in the future).

We deal with a hundreds of systems (SharePoint, SQL Server, VMware, custom website, ESB, ERP, etc.), solutions (that may be built on top of or involve multiple systems), and projects (typically an initiative to implement, improve, or upgrade a solution or product).  At any given time we have active ~5 major projects (major= involves 10 or more people spanning multiple teams and outside vendors, 6 month duration or longer), and around ~50 minor projects (2 or 3 people, a few tasks may or may not span across teams).

I'm trying to see the best ways to organize this in Jira.

We could do 1 Project per Jira Project, but we'd end up with hundreds of Jira Projects and I don't see a way to prioritize one project over another.

We could also make a Jira Project for each team and make our "Projects" into Jira Epics, I like this idea and would probably work.  One issue we'll run into here is we need to be able to prioritize some projects (Jira epics) over other projects/Jira Epics and we'd Jira to reflect that, I'm sure there's a way to do it but I'm just not seeing it.

For our systems and solutions I was thinking of making those labels or components.

Any suggestions?

 

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Brook Warner February 26, 2018

Have you investigated the Portfolio for Jira addon? I think your second option (using epics as 'projects') could be a good way to go about this.

 

bbryan February 27, 2018

Thanks.  That's what we ended up doing, Boards are Teams and Epics are Projects that have a defined goal, e.g. "Implement Confluence Wiki" and components are permanent projects/systems/solutions that may have issues against them but no defined goal or end date, e.g. "Confluence Wiki".  So far this model is working well.

MB January 19, 2020

This is an interesting approach. Tell me BBryan, How do you use this structure for the metrics reporting on your projects?

bbryan January 22, 2020

I wouldn't say we have good metric reporting with this approach yet.  We use Jira's Epic Report and Epic Burndown, and to get a little more detail we have written a few custom reports in Tableau which can connect to Jira's API (Cloud) or MySQL database (server).

LusineTerteryan February 10, 2020

I've noticed that in the first part is very close to my question. How can I prioritize my Projects, if there are several ones? So have some place to give them different importance (rank them somehow). For ex. as tasks Highest>High>Low>Lowest?

thanks)

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