Hi All,
First off, I'm very new to JIRA so please excuse a potentially poor question!
I am looking at how we can use JIRA in technology development projects. We are a development and manufacturing company not a software house so we are exploring using BigPicture to let us combine the most useful parts of JIRA for us with the waterfall approach that is more comfortable for our needs.
My question concerns Projects and Initiatives. Some of our 'work bundles' (we'd call them projects) are directly associated with product platforms (which are discrete) and others are new developments. My initial thought was to set up the Product Platforms plus a couple of other types as Projects and then use Initiatives to capture what we would normally define as projects (i.e. stage-gated packages of work where each stage would contain epics contributing to a 'release').
Is this a sensible approach or should I just make each project a 'Project'?
We need to be able to compare and review progress across the projects (using Portfolio or BigPicture, probably BigPicture) eventually building towards scenario planning and detailed resource management when new work comes along.
I've searched around the documentation and I can't work out what the exact difference between Initiative and Project is.
As I said, sorry if this is a dumb question but I'm new to this :-).
Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
