What are best practices for revamping of a jira environment?

[Snorre Strand Asbjørnsen]

Our Jira environment is being revamped to better align project development with business requirements and goals while giving the development teams more freedom. We will create 2 new Issue types to be implemented in the global hierarchy.  

This is how the structure will look and what are typical timelines of issue types.

- Bet (Funding and the project total timeline)

- Workstream (More than 2 years) --- New Issue type in hierarchy

- Initiative (1 year +)

- Epic (3-12 Months)

- Feature (1-3 Months) (New Issue type in hierarchy)

- User Story (2 Week sprints)

The "Workstream" issue type represented high up in the hierarchy is designed to communicate with upper management aligning with larger goals and written with minimal to zero technical jargon.

Second issue type to be implemented between Epic and Story called Features. This level is designed to increase the freedom for our technology development teams to create short-term objectives (1-3 months) to be more digestible in the teams to breakdown concrete objectives in the teams sprints (2 week sprints). Our idea here is to rename Epic to Feature which would enable the epic functionality related to reporting on the Feature level. Than we would create an Epic issue type to be in between the Initiative (parent) and Feature (child).

We are testing out how this would work in the Jira Sandbox. However, we are trying to understand best practices for such a large scale change.

Due to the large change I feel this is the right time to also perform a backlog cleanup and cleanup of legacy custom fields.

Are their other elements we should also try to standardize and simplify, Like for example workflows standardization across teams? 

Do you have any suggestions for how we should utilize dependency in such a hierarchy?

One of my other goals is to have the ability to have good data basis to pull out valuable analytics with minimal transformation of data. For example improving our capabilities for utilizing the Jira Dashboard capabilities. What else can I do in order to have better data quality. 

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Hi @Snorre Strand Asbjørnsen,

I am Marlene, product manager of codefortynine.

If by any chance you have Deep Clone for Jira or Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards installed on your Jira instace, both apps could help you with these complex workflows. 

With Deep Clone you can copy any Jira issue tree, also your custom issue tree. So if you have recurring processes where it could make sense to work with template issues, hiearchies or projects you could use Deep Clone to replicate them.

Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards can help to keep a better overview of large projects. Our app provide a Quick Controller gadget that enables you to filter down a dashboard dynamically. So you could use the same dashboard for both, the overview of all project and to zoom in to the work of specific teams or even assignees. 

You can try it our without installation our demo dashboards.