Question about epics...

[Stu]

I have many projects with end customers, in a portfolio of work.  For each end customer,  there are some business engagement activities that could result in multiple related PoC projects.  Later on, there could be a new business engagement that could have some more PoC projects.  I also need to track the relationship between the business engagement and PoC projects within the entire work with the end customer.
To summarise...  for each customer, I need to track:

1. Customer engagements projects, as well as the tasks under that.
2. related PoC projects - with tasks under that.
3. the link between customer engagement project and the related PoC projects.  Note for 1 client there could be multiple iterations of this. eg Customer Engagement project x maps to PoC projects, 1, 2, 3 and customer engagement project y maps to PoC projects 4,5,6.

I thought the best way to do this would be to:

Setup a new project for the end customer.

To track customer engagements - create an Epic, have a custom field, multi-select, which equals 'Customer Engagement'.  

To track related PoC projects, create an Epic, and set custom field multi-select equals 'PoC project'.
I’m pretty sure that the above will work well, happy to hear if someone has a better idea.  However, how do I track the relationship or linkage between customer relationship Epics and PoC project Epics? My understanding is that you can’t link epics to epics, is that right?
Thanks

[Peter DeWitt]

In addition to what Marcin has recommended above, You could also spin up a new project for each customer engagement.  Jira isn't going to care much about the number of projects, as long as they are all sharing the same schemas and configurations.

You could also take the approach of creating a new issuetype and then a link along the line lines of Parent of / Child of  to link the epics together.  This would give the appearance of a hierarchy even though the linking is horizontal.

If you want to take the plug-in route, check out Botron's Issue Matrix.

pjd

[Stu]

OK thanks Peter, so regarding your second paragraph, what you're saying is that I could track the customer engagement at the issue level, by creating a new Issuetype, that would be 'Business Engagement'.  Is that right?  Thanks

[Peter DeWitt]

 That's correct.  The new Issuetype would act as the glue for all the Epics.  You would probably want to create a new issue link to make it a bit more customized.

[Marcin Żurawiecki]

Hello Stu,

You can use issue links to connect Epics with each other, but I guess this solution isn't the one you are looking for as it doesn't create a real structure.

Have you considered to use a standard issue type for PoC projects and a subtask issue type for tasks performed for each project? This way you would have a more natural structure of your process (if I do understand your case right):

End customer (Jira project) -> Customer engagement (Epic) -> PoC project (standard issue type) -> Task (subtask issue type).

Let me know what are your thoughts on this.

Kind regards,
Marcin

[Stu]

thanks for the info, I'll investigate this a bit more.