How to structure our JIRA projects

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to bring JIRA in a new team at work and I'm not sure how to structure their reality.

It's a team of around 10 peoples separated in 3 skills sets (Analyst, Project Manager, Dev front end). They a fairly clear workflow process that varies depending of the project. What I was thinking is create an standard issue type (let's call Project) and then different sub-task issue type for all the process of the work (analysis, documentation, deliverable, etc.). The biggest advantage is that the Project issue would serve to control scope and budget (all the time put in subtask goes in the master issue).

They manage a lot of small differents projects in their day to day. Since the scope of project varies a lot (a project varies from 10h to 150h) and we must prioritize project on a weekly basis, I wanted to use Portfolio to do capacity planning for the team.

The problem is : Portfolio do not seem to work greatly with sub-tasks. Since all the real work would be done in subtasks, I don't think this could work. On the other hand, if we use only standard issue type, we won't be able to track budget at the project level...

Do anyone has had that type of problem ?

Alexandre Thouin · Answer

Hi @robert Mugabuhamye,

Good to hear from you !

Just want to be 100% sure, what you're telling me is that if we use epic at the project level, we can have a global view of time spent between the different standard issues ?

robert Mugabuhamye · Answer

hello @Alexandre Thouin 
You can create a new portfolio Hierarchy
Then use standard issue :

project issue ype

--task type 1

--task type 2

The problem with this is that the time logged on the task won't roll up to the project. You will have to script that or see it in Porfolio

The second solution would be to use Epic->tasks-subtask native hierarchy. You will have to educate your team that Epic = project. I know it is not 100% custom to your reality, but the epic is well integrated into a lot of Jira features. 
But I agree with you, it is a shame that we can't create a custom issue type at the Epic level.

Regards