Is it possible to have parallel activities like project management, qa and development, since stages seem to be sequentially only.

[andreas.koch@isquare.de]

How can I plan project management in JIRA portfolio. I have stages likes design, implementation, test, but from project start to project end I need project management. How would I do that?

[Martin Suntinger]

There are basically two options: 

1) Use stages and turn off "stage/sprint constraints" in the plan settings (in the Scheduling section) - this will allow stages to run in parallel if there is capacity. 

2) Use releases rather to model start and end dates or phases of project acticities, such as an analysis phase. Releases can have overlapping start/end dates. Break up the work packages accordingly in order to assign them into these releases (phases)

I'd need a bit more context to really judge if these are viable options and what are pro's and con's, so this is quite high-level input based on previous implementations we saw.