How to track status of multiple projects which have inter-dependency through Jira Software

[abhishek_sharma03]

How to track status of multiple projects which have inter-dependency through Jira Software ?

Our project team is working on a complex product development which involves multiple teams working on different interdependent modules. We have separate Jira projects for these teams but a common backlog. How can a MD or CTO track the progress of the product from a bird's eye view in Jira. We have been maintaining loads of complex excel sheets to achieve this. Would be nice if we could track all this using Jira Software.

[John Funk]

Hi @abhishek_sharma03  - You might give the Advanced Roadmaps product a try. It is only available with a premium membership so that might be cost prohibitive, too. 

Roadmaps are only available for a single project. Advanced Roadmaps have replaced the Portfolio product and cover multiple projects. 

If you have something that big and need to be able to see the information like you do, it is a bit naive to think that you won't need additional products which will raise your costs. Even if you are doing it with multiple spreadsheets, you are expending the cost in labor/FTEs. 

You should at least do a trial on Premium and see if the Advanced Roadmaps meet your need. 

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @abhishek_sharma03 ,

WIth Jira you can establish dependencies among issues using issue linking, but visualization is not obvious. My team was having the same challenges and started exploring Jira Align, which seems to address dependencies very well

Portfolio/advanced roadmaps  seems to implement this use case as well. Did you try any of these tools (or would they be an option for you)?

[abhishek_sharma03]

Jira Align is surely out of question it being an expensive proposition. But Roadmaps / Portfolio can be an option. But the client is currently not in favour of spending money on add-on. What could be good suggestions in terms of process and  customization in Jira dashboards and filters through which we can achieve this ?

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Yeah, I understand. I'm not sure how to accomplish this with native Jira, I'd probably make a case that Advanced Roadmaps/Portfolio could save time and maintenance of the excel sheet solution, which in the end would result in a good ROI. That said, before I had access to Portfolio and Jira Align, I built my own Confluence page with a table that contained Jira filters where I included dependencies. For that though, you'd need something like Script Runner's issueFunction. This is the JQL I used then:

(issueFunction in linkedIssuesOf("issuekey=<issue_key>") and  (resolutiondate >= -7d OR status not in (Resolved, Closed)) order by updated DES

The first clause gave me the dependencies for a specific issue, while the second clause would remove the issues that were closed except for those that were resolved in the last 7 days, I wanted to keep those in the query result to make people aware of the cases that were recently resolved.

[abhishek_sharma03]

Hey Guys, @Carlos Garcia Navarro @John Funk , My client is not interested to purchase Portfolio for Jira (it being too expensive for him). Hence i advised a stop-gap solution for him by introducing a custom field named - Program. I made it a multi-select field as one story could be a part of 2 programs as well. I made it a mandatory field to be selected in requirement issuetypes (story or tasks). Then created filters similar to  below -

Project in ("API Development", "Digital Campaigns") AND Program in (Program1) ORDER BY created DESC 

for all the programs and displayed them through a pie chart. By this way the client was able to see the high level progress on his initiatives / program. But he won't be able to judge if the progress is on track or not basis the target date.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @abhishek_sharma03 , I'm glad to hear that you found a solution that made your customer happy, nice job! :-)