Plan Sprints for several teams in several jira-projects

[Roman Joss]

Hi everyone

Is there a possibility to manage Sprints for several teams, when they working with separate jira-projects?

Scenario:

We have about 20 Scrum-Teams. They all should work with the same Sprint-Names and Dates. The Scrum-Teams would like to manage their own Versions and Components. Therefore, they need their own Jira-projects.

Is there a way to define the sprints, Start and close Sprints by a central role for defined Jira-Projects?

Thanks for your help and tipps.

[BenP · Accepted solution]

Yes, we are doing this at the moment.. our approach is as follows:

- create a new issuetype "sprint marker"
- create a sprint mgmt project & agile scrum board, in which "sprint marker" issues are created

A project XXXXXX that follows the "company wide sprint" frequence, is typically defined as follows:

- consists of regular issue types (not sprint marker)
- agile board data is based on issues from the project itself + additionally includes sprint marker issues issues , e.g.

Issuetype = "Sprint Marker" OR project = "XXXXXX" AND issuetype in (Epic, Story, Analysis, Bug, "Test Issue") ORDER BY Rank ASC

- agile board gets a convenience quick filter, to hide the sprint markers on plan & scrum boards, e.g.

Issuetype != "Sprint Marker"

Next, you create future sprints:

1. create sprint marker issues in the sprint mgmt project
2. create future sprints in the sprint mgmt agile board
3. assign each sprint marker to 1 future sprint

Because the agile boards include the sprint marker issues, the sprints to which they are assigned will become visible in the planning mode view of the agile scrum boards & can be used to allocate the regular project work to.

The sprint marker issues are managed by our JIRA admin team & are closed at the end of the sprint, just before sprint completion.

Note that additional access rights on the 'sprint mgmt project' are required to complete/start sprints, so only limited users can still perform this.

Our various project mgrs take this into account & ensure required scrum activities are done by sprint completion & before the next sprint is started.

Cheers,

Ben

[Roman Joss]

Hello Ben

That sounds very good and would also solve the problem, that the Sprints are shown in the Agil-Boards. I was quite sure, that the sprints are separatly in each jira-project.

I will go on to test your solution an i will reply at least on the end of the week.

Thanks a lot!
Roman

[Roman Joss]

Hello Ben

I could already test this scenario on our staging-environment and it works perfectly. Thanks again for your detailed and complete description, it helped a lot!

Roman

[BenP]

Hi Roman,

Really glad this matches your requirements as well.
For us, this was important since our deliveries are timed to a predefined frequency.
This helps all teams to work towards the same time frame.

Cheers,

Ben

[Roman Joss]

Hi Ben

Yes, thats also very important to us. We have over 20 ScrumTeams and all should follow the same sprint-time-scale as all results are deployed on the same time. Unfortunately the dependencies are very large.

We started with one Jira-Project and more and more teams wanted to work with Jira-Agile. That works pretty well. But now there are a few requests as described in the question.

Now i will have a look on othe questions and answers in this site. That could really help to organise the hole instance.

Thanks again,
Roman

[BenP]

I guess ur already aware of SAFe? (we're not there yet, but working towards it)

[Roman Joss]

What do you mean with SAFe?

[BenP]

Scaled Agile Framework ( http://scaledagileframework.com/)

[Roman Joss]

Hello Ben

No, i was not aware of this. We are on the way to this. We changed our methodology on the beginning of this year to scrum, team by team. Now we are making our experiences on this way. Thanks for the tip.

[Julia Levcovets]

Hello Roman,

the thing is - sprint is attached to filter not to the project

[Dave]

Sprints are actually global, and attached to issues, not filters.

[Roman Joss]

The Answer from Ben de Pauw confirmed this statement. I was not aware of this situation. Thanks for your help.