Provide team members to see their issues across different projects - both Scrum and Kanban

[David Stokes]

Hi

This question seems to be coming up more often, particularly as I get companies using Jira outside of just software development.  So here's the typical scenario - we have a range of projects - scrum projects for delivery and Kanban projects for functional teams. But what this means is that a team member can be part of both the functional team (Kanban) as well as working on 1 or more projects (Scrum).  And there can be issues assigned to them on other teams functional boards as those teams work together.

As you can imagine, the team members are struggling as they are on more than one board and what they need is a consolidated view so they don't need to be jumping between boards.  And when they are doing planning, they need to see what they are already committed to on other boards.

So, how can I provide that view?

I've been doing lots of research and testing and what it's come down to is you will run into problems trying to combine scrum and kanban boards.  Using some test projects I seemed to be able to get it to work on a Kanban board so that it includes the scrum issues (sprint in opensprints).  But when I tried it on some real projects, it wasn't including all of the issues from the scrum projects.  All I can imagine is that there's something going on under the bonnet that just makes scrum and kanban incompatible.

So then I looked at just making all of the projects scrum and parallel sprints.  That did work (sort of) but then you run into issues which sprint an issue goes into - you need to make sure that you use the sprint relating to the project.

And then there are epics...... epics get really messy as epics are not tied to just one project - you can link an issue on an epic from another project.  So then you end up with a mess of epics...

Anyway, this is where I'm at - I'm reaching out to the community for some advice.

Cheers
David

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @David Stokes 

Yup, it is a challenging whenever people are put in the difficult position of being on more than one team.  Especially agile teams, where divided focus/loyalty leads to becoming a blocker-generator...through no fault of their own.

Be that as it may... You could solve this by building a generic Kanban board, simplifying the columns to To Do, Doing, and Done.  Then create a filter which spans all source project boards, and map all status values appropriately.

One problem with this approach is visibility: how can other team members see what is on the plate of their shared person without also looking at multiple boards themselves?

Perhaps increasing knowledge sharing and reducing WIP can minimize the number of people who get put into this difficult and stressful position.

Good luck, and best regards,

Bill