Reporting on Teams over Multiple Discovery Projects

[Nathan Nicholson]

Hi,

We are using Discovery Projects to manage ideas for different value stream within the business.

Within the respective Discovery Projects we have created appropriate Teams that are assigned to each Idea.

In some circumstances a Team will be assigned to Ideas in multiple different Discovery Projects.

I am wondering if it is possible to use the Top-Level Planning Projects to group by Teams with the same name, or multiple different Teams and grouping them so we can see Ideas in different Discovery Projects that are going to require the same Team (resource).

I would be grateful if you could let me know of anything that is currently possible or if there are any plans that would help us with this requirement.

Thank-you,

Nathan

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Nathan Nicholson,

This is a scenario I have not experienced yet, but still ...

Product Discovery projects under the hood are team managed. That is not an ideal situation for reporting cross project, as things like status, most custom fields, ... are restricted to a single project.

Having said that, if there is one place in Jira where I can understand that approach, it would be here. All in all, it makes sense to collect ideas around a product, rather than a team.

When it comes to reporting, I would primarily look at dashboards to display information from multiple projects, even in this case. You can leverage Jira filters to collect ideas from multiple projects and add gadgets of your choice to visualise the information on a single dashboard.

Lastly, I would like to point out that Jira Product Discovery is built to track and manage the ideation process, not the delivery work. As soon as an idea becomes something that you are really going to work on, the epics, stories and tasks to track the work are best managed in Jira Software or Jira Work Management. That's where your delivery teams come in and where you can indeed build planning views on top of.

Hope this helps! 

[Nathan Nicholson]

Hi Walter,

Thank-you for your answer and taking the time to consider the question in the first place. Also, couldn't agree more on the Products verses Teams comments.

I will explore using the dashboards approach and see what I can achieve through that.

We keep the ideas high-level, concepts and inputs and then build out acceptance criteria and BDD scenarios within Confluence.

Once we know the reqs and have grouped scenarios we then great appropriate Storys for the relevant scenarios. AT which point we are linking the Story as a Delivery ticket.

While doing all of this the Product Owner is using the timeline feature to roughly throw it against a calendar and see how they might sequence. It is at that point where it is then helpful to see if other we have the same team assigned ideas for a similar timeframe across multiple discovery projects. At this point we may/may not have the Story.

If we can/need to use the top level planning projects to have better visibility of sequencing and team assignment then perhaps we need to drop something into the teams backlog even though it isn't fully fleshed out.

Thanks again for the reply.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Nathan Nicholson

just to add to Walter's great answer, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields - including Product Discovery fields - much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

Plus, as every JXL sheet is powered by a JQL statement, you can easily create cross-project views, including as many Product Discovery projects (or any other projects, for that matter) as you want. JXL can also combine multiple project-specific fields (like e.g. a teams field) into a single column, using so-called merged columns. 

This is how it looks in action:

Note how there are issues from two projects, with a combined teams column.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Nathan Nicholson]

Interesting, thanks Hannes. We will consider it.