Visualising tasks to manage multiple projects -- critical path analysis/viz

[Cedric Justice]

Hi all:

I'm trying to find a way to visualise the work that I do. Here's the context.

Context

I am the automation engineer that takes data from databases and, pending business requirements, sends a daily list to our marketing department. Each of these are different campaigns we run.

I am currently running 8 campaigns concurrently. 

Difficulties

As business requirements change or bugs/errors are discovered, each campaign (or a subset/group of campaigns) needs to be modified.

Typically, we will create an epic to update several campaigns, add a QA subtask to it, and roll it out.

The difficulty I'm having is not all of us are perfectly fluent in JIRA (me included), and I'm having difficulty with the reporting tools, the backlog tools, and a variety of other means to get a big-picture view.

Example

Today, I found a group of campaigns that I updated nearly 2 months ago; but we didn't have the visibility to show me that 2/3 of them require the QA step in order to be put into production. Of course, I have now added QA tasks, but it would be really nice if there were a better way to discover this, rather than going into individual tickets.

Best-case scenario

Since I'm operating on the proverbial moving train, than there are often dependencies on sub-components (I have a macro library I'm trying to roll out in parallel to each campaign), I'm hoping to find a way to identify the following things in a more visual way.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Campaign name: Campaign G 

Dev version(s)      | backlog                     |    In process      | Done    |  QA'd  | In production

Dev version(s)      |--1059/ blocker 642---|-----------------|  1042   | ---------|  971

Campaign name: Campaign N 

Dev version(s)      | backlog  |   In process             | Done    |  QA'd     | In production

Dev version(s)      |-----------|-1091/blocker 642 -| ------  | ----948-- |  942

Campaign name: Subcomponent blocker for both campaigns (ticket 642)

Dev version(s)      | backlog  |   In process       | Done    |  QA'd | In production

Dev version(s)      |----------|-----642----------|  -------  | ---------|  451

That is a lot easier for me to tell where I am in the workflow chain. I can see that there are two versions of Campaign G coming along and that there is a version of Campaign N that is ready to be pushed into production. I can also see my critical path: that 642 is blocking both of the next versions of both campaigns and that needs to be put into production before those two can go anywhere. 

Does something like this exist? There are lots of great features I see in JIRA that seem to point to this, but I don't know how to express it. Is there a Tableau plugin I could use to create this? Can I do this in Draw.io? Anything? 

Thanks for any assistance you can lend,

-Cedric Justice

Alteryx Developer and Automation Specialist

Cambia Healthcare

[Damir Semiz]

Hi Cedric, 

If I understood you correctly, you are searching for a plugin that helps you get an overview of your project. That is to see the progress and dependencies/blocks for different Campaigns in the same view?

I think that Dependency Map could help you with that.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218391/dependency-map-for-jira-link-viewer?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview

It allows you to visualize your work in the way you prefer it. 

For example you could configure a map that shows Campaign A - N in rows and the Sprints in columns in a matrix layout, or other layouts if you would prefer. There are a lot of options depending on your needs. 

A good thing about Dependency Map is that it not only gives you a good overview of your choice, you can also easily see blocks e.g "critical path: that 642 is blocking both of the next versions of both campaigns".

I hope this helps :) 

[Cedric Justice]

Thanks for this. I will try to see if I can get it installed; I don't own our instance or even know who to ask to have it installed, but this looks somewhat like what I'm looking for: lanes for each campaign with the status on the top so I can see the different tickets march forward to production. The colour coding is great as well.