EasyAgile TeamRhythm: how to use a single storymap with multiple teams?

[Willem-Jan Jansen]

This question is specifically about TeamRhythm by EasyAgile:

We have multiple teams working on different aspects of a single product.
In order to have a comprehensive overview of the product and user experience I'd like to use a single Storymap, to keep everyone on the same page.

For Sprint planning and retros it would be handy, however, if teams can run their own rituals.

I did notice I can make 'Team' show up in the cards on the storymap in the demo - but the issue-popup does not seem to facilitate editing it - and I haven't found a way to filter the storymap by teams.

(How) does TeamRhythm by EasyAgile support such a workflow with multiple teams?

Thanks in advance for any guidance,

Willem-Jan

[Tenille _ Easy Agile · Accepted solution]

Hi Willem-Jan,

Tenille here from Easy Agile. Greetings from sunny Australia, and thanks for your question!

TeamRhythm is designed as a team-level tool; once you’ve installed the app, you’ll have one User Story Map and retrospective space for each of your agile boards in Jira. The design assumption that we’ve made here is one team per board. 

It may also help to understand that TeamRhythm displays Epic and issue data directly from Jira, and as such, any edits made while viewing the TeamRhythm User Story Map are also reflected in Jira. 

To have all your teams work from one User Story Map they would need to work from one Jira board. This would be possible, but quite complex. You could consider using Jira Components to identify teams and create filters in TeamRhythm based on those components. That would give each team a different view filtered for their work only. Your teams would be sharing the one retrospective space though, which would not be ideal, particularly from a psychological safety perspective. 

A solution may be to use one Jira Project for your product and create an agile board for each team using the same set of Epics, but a subset of issues. Each of these Jira boards would have a TeamRhythm User Story Map and retrospective space dedicated to it.  

To set this up in Jira, you would do the following:  

1. In Jira, create a field that describes the work of each team - you could set these up using Jira Components, or you could create a custom field named “Team”.
2. Next, run an Advanced Search in Jira for the team's issues, and the Epics in that Project, eg. project = ABC AND (component = "IOS team" OR issuetype = Epic) order by created DESC.
3. Save that Search as a filter.
4. Create a new Scrum or Kanban board using an existing Filter; one for each of the filters you made in steps 2-3.

Your teams would just need to understand that Epics are shared, and any changes they may wish to make as the product evolves over time, also impact other teams.

If managing cross-team collaboration is something you're aiming to address, you might also like to consider Easy Agile Programs. Programs makes it easier to manage work across teams. Each team’s board is added to the ‘program’, giving you a roadmap of the work organised by team swimlanes. You can highlight cross-team dependencies and visualise scheduling conflicts, which is very useful particularly where the work of two teams intersects. You can read more about Easy Agile Programs here on our website. It is also available in the sandbox demo that I think you referred to in your original question (but also here: https://demo.easyagile.com/demo/programs)

I hope this helps! If you’d like to speak in more detail about using any of our apps for Jira, feel free to reach out to us directly.

Kind regards

Tenille | Easy Agile

[Willem-Jan Jansen]

Great - thanks for your elaborate answer, Tenille!

[Tenille _ Easy Agile]

Happy to help ☺️