For teams new to Jira or teams looking to standardize your workflow, this "quick-start" template outlines the simplest standard workflow within Jira to easily make sure all your work connects to the highest priority work across the company for visibility within Velma. It's based on how a majority of the best-in-class teams work today.
Each Jira Type is outlined in its own section below. Within each section, you'll find the following details:
Jira Setup: This is what the item is called and how the item is configured in Jira
What It Is: The connection to common terminology and how it may be referenced within your company today
Who Updates: Who is typically responsible for keeping this item updated
How It'll Be Visualized: How you'll see it used on Velma and connects with the information on the platform
Issue Type: Initiative
This is created as an "Initiative" issue type. This can either be on one consolidate board to represent ALL the initiatives within the company, or if each team or project is solely responsible for an initiative, then it can be represented at the team or project level.
This is usually work that spans multiple different teams at a company. They usually line up directly with your OKRs or high-level company goals / bets for the quarter. This is typically the level that leadership and stakeholders within the company track towards/
The Product Operations or Project Management team usually create these initiatives and coordinates each team linking their body of work into the company-level initiatives.
This is the highest block of work that will have detailed project status, progress, due dates, and updates. You will be able to drill into all work that relates to these projects within your views.
Documentation on how to create a board
If you want to further divide your team into smaller units, you can use the Components field to house this information. This is useful if you want to see everything in the same place but want one more layer of detail available or if you don't think the granularity makes sense for the cross-org view
This represents your Teams. This is however you want to visualize your work across your teams.
If it’s helpful for you to combine all your teams in one day-to-day view, then this would be one unified board with the "Components" field used to designate the individual teams. If it’s helpful for you to see work across each team separately, then you would create a board for each team.
Work with your company's Jira administrator to get your board set up!
You’ll see which teams are working on which projects, and can then drill into which epics belong to which team
Similar to the "Initiative" this is also an issue type that you can designate when creating a new issue. For more information, Jira has a detailed tutorial on how to create and modify Epics.
This represents your team’s work for the Quarter or Half
These are large pieces of work specifically for your team that you will track over time. You can usually think of these items as "milestones" with a clear set of tasks required for delivery.
Your Team: You would create epics directly on your board once you start planning work for the quarter or half
You can then see how your work fits in with everyone else’s work for cross-team projects in the quarter or half. This makes it extremely easy to track progress and potential risks / dependencies
This is also an issue type that you can designate when creating a new issue
If you need to break down work into even smaller steps, you can use Sub-tasks within Stories
This represents tasks that would take 1-3 days to complete
These are how you break down the large quarter goals into pieces to easily iterate and deliver
Your Team: The team works together to create these smaller stories to represent the pieces of work necessary to deliver on the Epic
The story-level progress is shown at the epic level, and users can drill down to see information at the story level
.png){kind=small}