What would be the best way to manage multiple projects within the same team concurrently?

[Kevin Dickson]

I have a multi-disciplinary team encompassing various dev channels (.NET, Angular, USSD) plus QA and automation.

This team has multiple projects to delivery concurrently, with the work per project including all above channels, and team members working at various capacities across the projects.
(Reason for this is that there are various channel requirements per project, and not all developers will be 100% allocated to a single project as some ony require 10-20% of their capacity).

What would be the best way to manage this on a Jira project board?
If I set up seperate boards per project and edit the board sources in an all-emcompassing project board I see all sprints for all boards.
On the "main" project board I only want to see a single sprint for the entire team across all projects, whilst also being able to filter per project, and also use the seperate boards for refining 1-2 sprints ahead.

Also, I am using Advanced Roadmaps to create an EXCO view across all projects, but if I create seperate teams per channel, I can only assign them to one project/board source.
I need to be able to create a view that allows me to view resources across all the team projects as they would each have different capacity requirements of the team (50%, 80% etc).

The reason for including both questions in one topic is that
1. I need to find a way to perform both of above, i.e. in standups be able to see a single sprint in progress across all projects whilst also being able to refine upcoming sprints per project, and
2. Be able to report back per project on Advanced Roadmaps on capacity restraints and individual project progress

Any and all assistance appreciated in advance.
Thanks guys and gals!

[Chris Boys · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kevin Dickson looks like you need to use components for the set-up.  Here are two links to get you on your way:

- Organise work with components

 - Managing Multiple teams

If you're struggling to get the performance optics at the different levels in Advance Roadmaps, Umano (disclosure - I'm founder) can then report real-time progress for each Sprint / Kanban iteration and as a roll-up using 25+ agile metrics, optimising data from your end-to end workflow when you connect Jira, Git (bitbucket, Github, Gitlab), Wiki and Slack.

Good luck,
Chris

[Kevin Dickson]

Thank you, Chris - I'll look at your proposed solution today and provide feedback

[Nicolas Tagle · Accepted solution]

Hello Kevin, 

It looks from your use case that this is something that can be tackle with Advance Roadmap ( "Plan" Tab in the upper Menu of Jira), you can see more about this feature on the following link, https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/roadmaps/advanced-roadmaps. Notice that this feature is available for Premium Accounts.

Let me know if this was helpful, best regards,

Nico.

[Kevin Dickson]

Thank you, Nico, I'll look at this today and provide feedback asap.

[Haddon Fisher]

There are definitely lots of potential ways you could do this; here's one way...

• I'd agree with Chris Boys that components are probably the best way to keep track of what skill-sets are needed to address individual tickets. I've used a single-select custom field as well, but the ubiquity of "component", the fact that it's editable by project admins, and having a "component lead" make it a slightly better fit in most cases. The one caveat is they're project specific, so if any of your work crosses the project boundary they would not work.
• It sounds like you're doing Scrum; if you're treating this as a single team, then I might suggest trying to work out of only one Agile board, at least when working with the team. Quick filters and swimlanes are great ways to make the board appear less overwhelming, but I've found trying to keep everyone going to "the right board" and juggling between them in meetings to be more trouble than it's worth.
• I would use a Jira dashboard to view and manage capacity; shameless plug for Rich Filters here (I am not affiliated with them, just a fan) because it will let you (among many other things) create a two-dimensional gadget showing the sum of story points per assignee (or per component) per sprint.
  • I have found in some cases that dashboards don't quite get me all the way, mainly because I want to see per-skill capacity over time and not just as it is right now. Its more manual than it should be, but I have had good luck with using Google Sheets to do this kind of reporting (apologies that the doc is only half-written right now; there's an example of how I do PA\Capitalization Expense reporting which shows this a bit better).