Automate Epics start/due dates based on estimated duration

[Ryan Läemmle]

Hello,

Experienced Jira user but amateur project creator here.....

I have been tasked with creating a project which has all the stages of our sales cycle in it.

We moved from Excel as it has many smaller pieces which require a lot of attention and have work from Sales, R&D, Engineering, delivery etc in it.

My dilemma..

We want to use this to obviously track progress, assign work etc but also want to use it to track durations and have a nice gannt chart view of estimated time (start to finish) and actual time for each piece. 

Each Epic or work item could have "gates" which need to be completed before moving on but does also have Epics which could run parallel.

These projects all have the same steps and i am using "Deep Clone" to move epics and work items to a new Project each time.

My questions:

1) should i be using a PM or Scrum style project?

1) Each Epic has child work items and has a specified "estimated" duration. How can i automatically set start and due dates cascading for each epic based off an initial start date and then consequently, the following epics based of estimated duration of each?

3) Should i rather be using sprints or is there automation that can help me here?

[Luka Hummel - codefortynine]

Hi @Ryan Läemmle and welcome to the community.

If you are already using Deep Clone for Jira to clone your templates, you can use the Field Editor with Jira Expressions to calculate the new Start and End Dates based on other custom fields present in your template (like your 'estimates') while cloning the template issues.

You can also save the Field Editor configuration in a Preset to reuse it every time you need to duplicate the template.

[Ryan Läemmle]

Hi @Luka Hummel - codefortynine ,

Thank you for your suggestion. I do not see the "jira Expression" option in the dropdown when trying to use the field editor in the cloning process.... any ideas?

[Matteo Vecchiato]

Hi @Ryan Läemmle

My two cents...

For this scenario, I would recommend a standard business project, not Scrum and not sprints; the scrum approach is feasible only if the team works with a predefined slot of time.

Without any marketplace apps, it's not possible to calculate automatically the start and due date in a easy way.

You could try with an automation that, using a jql, find the last epic (by due date) and adjust the new epic start date accordingly ( and the child's work items).

The automation trigger could be a predefined workflow status (like "planning").

I hope it helps.

Regards