Best Practices for Managing Epics in One Project and Child Issues in Separate Product Projects

[Núria Rull Bassols]

Hello Atlassian Community,

My company is currently exploring a new approach to managing our backlog structure in JIRA, and we are genuinely curious about your insights or experiences from the community. Your input is invaluable to us.

Our company has traditionally maintained a unified product backlog within respective product projects in JIRA, where initiatives, epics, stories, tasks, and bugs are all managed together. We are considering a change where all epics would be centralised in a single project, while the corresponding stories, tasks, and bugs would reside in separate, individual product projects.

This approach aims to streamline epic management and improve visibility at the portfolio level, but I have lots of concerns about the impact on reporting and cross-project tracking, particularly:

• How do you effectively manage and track the progress of epics when their child issues are in different projects?
• What are the common challenges with setting up boards and reports that need to aggregate data across multiple projects?
• What best practices would you recommend to minimise disruption and maintain productivity?
• What reports will be affected by this structural change?

Has anyone implemented a similar structure? Your experiences are incredibly valuable to me. What was your experience, and what challenges did you face? How did you overcome them, and what benefits have you observed?

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experiences!