Managing value-driven, cross-functional (ValCro) projects in <a class=”wiki external” target=”_blank” href=”https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira” rel=”external nofollow”>JIRA</a> can be challenging to keep everything cleanly wrapped up together. Here’s a proven idea which may work for you too.
So going back a few years at I was working at a music software company where IT Operations was in the common situation of constantly playing catchup with Agile software development. We were already hammering home DevOps processes like tight feeback loops, sharing, learning and automation but collaboration was still a problem. Mostly around communicating around interdependant work, forward planning any work dependencies and keeping semi-automated, low-effort reports across teams.
JIRA was already being used company wide for tracking software development; change, problem and incident management so some time was invested into how we could organise our operational project work to solve the some of our problems.<br /> <h1>Our Objectives</h1>We wanted to solve as many of the following as possible:
<ul> <li>Have a top level description of the business value</li> <li>Have a road map level of milestones that would direct us to the final goal. This level would often be thought of as MVPs</li> <li>Separate team projects where they could manage their own pieces of work needed to reach the next milestone</li> <li>Kanban or Scrum boards for each team</li> <li>A way to estimate and track time against our estimates to improve time management and priorities</li> <li>A way for each team to report on their weekly progress</li> <li>Provide a weekly report to senior management on the overal progress of projects</li> <li>Keep all of this as effortless as possible</li> </ul> <h1>Structural Foundation</h1> <h2>The Who</h2>In this instance, I’ll just highlight the Operations vertical but the Business Value project links into other roadmaps, like Development, QA and InfoSec as well. The main teams working on these projects:
<ul> <li>Infrastructure and security</li> <li>QA</li> <li>Reporting</li> <li>Internal IT</li> <li>Systems</li> <li>Databases</li> <li>Applications</li> <li>Technical Operations Centre (TOC)</li> </ul> <h2>JIRA Projects</h2> <ul> <li>BUSVAL: Top level objective</li> <li>OPRO: Operations roadmap</li> <li>INFRA: Infrastructure and security</li> <li>QA: QA team project</li> <li>ITDEV: Internal office IT team project (like JIRA development)</li> <li>SYS: Systems team project</li> <li>DB: Databases team project</li> <li>APPS: Applications team project</li> <li>PROB: TOC problem management project</li> <li>INC: TOC incident management project</li> <li>CR: Change record project</li> </ul> <h1>Output</h1>Getting this information into a more easily digestible format is easy through JIRA and Confluence integration. Confluence has a JIRA macro for embedding issue details into a wiki page. For embedding statistics on performance, it also has a chart macro that brings in visualisations like what would be enabled in a JIRA dashboard
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