JIRA Structure: Possibility to split an Issue

[Andreas Gangwisch]

Hello everyone!

In my company we are using JIRA Structure for project management. We use Epics to track projects and Stories to track tasks.

I will show you the problem that we have with the help of an example:

In the following picture you can see a task with the duration of 40h and the length of one week.

The resources are calculated right and show 8h per day. In the next step, I log 35h of work. Until this point, everything is fine.

If the task now gets delayed e.g. by one week I would just pull the end of the task to the end of the following week. Time tr. is still 40h but the fixed duration changes to 80h because it is spread over two weeks now. But if I do that, the resources will show wrong numbers, as you can see in the following screenshot. 

This makes the resource planning very difficult, because it doesn't show that I was doing the 35h of work in the first week. If the task is delayed until friday of week 2 and I log the remaining 5h of work on said friday, the resources will still just show that I did 4h per day for the 2 weeks.

With many different projects and users it's basically impossible to get the resources right.

So my question is:

Is there a possibility to split the task in two parts, so that the resource planning can identify when there was no work done? Or is there any other option for me?

Our current solution is to end the task and create a new story that starts after the delay. But then all the comments and information are still stored in the first task.

I hope someone knows a solution to this problem.

Thanks in advance!

Andreas

[Philip Heijkoop _ALM Works_]

Hi Andreas,

Another ALM Works employee checking in, hoping to help. I have two options you could consider as a stop gap until we address this in-product. Without knowing the exact situation in depth, I had to make some assumptions. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to go over this in more depth.

1. If we purely care about resource planning in future, maybe we could consider shortening the chart. This effectively changes the bar from 'total work' to 'planned work left'. We could redefine the manual start date with a formula to basically increment from the original start date + the worklogged value and have the scheduling only use remaining estimate.
2. As you suggested another option would be to split it into two tasks when there are two different periods of work being done. The Gantt chart would happily have the story show the aggregate values of the two sub-tasks. Depending on your needs, you may want to create sub-tasks for each worklog. If you have automation for Jira or a scripting mechanism, you could write a hook into the work log option. You would then effectively get sub-tasks for each worklog (this can be super useful in some use cases) and then one for the remaining estimate, which could be deleted when it reaches 0. This could be a very useful way to keep track of the delta between estimates and actuals.

Option 1 involves no actual changes to your Jira data outside the Gantt chart, so there is very little risk of trying it and needing to revert to the current sub-optimal state. The second involves the automated creation of sub-tasks and linking them, etc. I VERY strongly encourage that one to be tested thoroughly (both for correctness and performance) in a staging instance before rolling it out to prod.

In full transparency, neither of these options is a quick fix, both will likely take a bit of work to implement and then tweak as user feedback comes in. However, if you'd like, my team is available to help you with this or we can try to brainstorm other options as we learn more about your challenge. You can either email us directly at solutions@almworks.com or submit a support ticket and mention me (David knows how to find me).

Hope that helps and please let us know if we can help further,

Phil

[Andreas Gangwisch]

Hi Philipp,

thank you so much for your answer! Could you please elaborate on option 1? I will definitely try this option, but I'm not quite sure how I should approach it.

Best regards and thanks again

Andreas

[David Niro]

Hello @Andreas Gangwisch ,

David from ALM Works here.  Welcome to the Community!

At the moment, the allocation calculation does not take into consideration the work logged.  We do have a task related to this and I have added your vote to it.

Regarding workarounds; The one you have employed is the best option at this point.  

I will follow up when there is an update to share.

Best Regards,
David

[Andreas Gangwisch]

Hi @David Niro ,

thank you for your quick answer! Very unfortunate that there is no better option at this point, but thank you for adding my vote to the task!

Best regards

Andreas

[Andreas Gangwisch]

Hi there, I do have one more question. 

Do you know if there is any other plugin that can solve the problem that we have?

Thanks in advance

Andreas

[Andreas Gangwisch]

Hey, right now I am trying out BigPicture, so I was wondering if this problem can be solved with it.

@Anna-BigPicture , do you know if BigPicture could solve my problem?

Thanks in advance

Andreas

[Fabian Lim]

Adding @Dave Rosenlund _Tempo_ 

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

I’m on holiday. Perhaps @David Niro  can help.