Best practice question - How do you manage releases FROM customer in your project plan?

[Christophe Sutter]

Hi all,

My company is already using Jira Cloud for all of its task / activity and some release management, but not for Project planning.

In the process of setting that up through Roadmaps, I am considering the best way to manage "external events". In my case, a lot of our development is dependant on our customer's progress:

- We develop our SW

- They integrate it in their own

- We receive it back for testing once integrating

and this process can iterate several times during a project.

I would thus like to use a Jira "object" relative to my customer's integration activity and link to my own tasks / Epics / deliveries in my planning.

I see several options in the way of creating tasks, Epics for this, and managing them myself, but that seems inelegant in some ways, and I am interested in knowing if some of you have already set up such practices to see if I could get inspiration from them.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[Philipp Barry]

Could you elaborate on what specifically seems "inelegant in some ways" to you? More detail on that perspective might help to understand what problems you are exactly trying to solve.

One thought without more context: Does it seem useful to you to have a conversation with your customer about working to some extent in the same tool so you both get more visibility on all steps of the collaboration process?

[Jacob Vu]

Hi @Christophe Sutter

Unfortunately, I don't think there's an elegant way to doing this without giving the vendor access to your JIRA instance.

I manage projects using JIRA / Advanced Roadmaps and when I have tasks for vendors to complete, I'll add it as a task/epic and manage it myself. This way, at least I know I'll be following the right formatting, structure, etc. that I have set and will have regular status meetings with them to update the task/epic. It's not a hands-off method (unlike getting the vendor to update) but the easiest / best solution I've thought of.

Hope that helps.

Jacob @ NorthTEK Consulting