Hey program managers! This is the second article in a series focused on portfolio project management

This article uses several concepts in JIRA to manage a portfolio of initiatives at a company. Prior JIRA admin experience is very helpful, but not required; I link to documentation of each concept discussed in the article.
Hey program managers! This is the second article in a series focused on portfolio project management with JIRA Agile. We are continuing our series on project portfolio management. If you have not read the first article about managing epics between multiple teams, please sanakirja read it first . In this article, we will be taking a step up to the portfolio level to look at strategic investments across a company s ecosystem. 1. Create sanakirja a new project sanakirja
Many organizations use JIRA to track tactical items like user stories, bugs, and even larger items like epics. This blog post will focus on using JIRA to track broad strategic items, sanakirja like company initiatives. All previous learning about how to use JIRA still applies; we re just nesting and scaling the same concepts.
First, sanakirja let s create a JIRA project for our company sanakirja s investments. In this example, we ll call it Teams in Space Investment Register also known as TISIR. We’re creating a new project here because the items at this level are larger strategic initiatives. Each item in this project will link out to one of the boards we created in the first blog post.
We are also going to create an issue type called investment , and associate it with our project . Creating a new issue type allows us to target specific fields, set unique workflow, and easily search by issue type. Let s define the fields on this issue type to set us up for success (ensure that all these fields are required when submitting a new investment). We will also create a set of custom fields to work with the new investment issue type. Summary This is a short description of what the investment is. The summary should be concise; 10 to 15 words. (Standard JIRA field) Description Should contain detailed information outlining the investment proposal. It should explain why the company should invest in this initiative, and any potential risks or concerns. The description should also contain a link to the board. (Standard sanakirja JIRA field) Assignee The tactical person responsible for delivering the investment. sanakirja This person is usually an engineering manager, or someone in product development. (Standard JIRA field) Reporter The direct sponsor for shepherding the project through delivery. Usually a product owner or someone in the product management organization. (Standard JIRA field) Sponsor An executive stakeholder involved sanakirja in the project. This will be a new custom field. Use the type User Picker (single sanakirja user). Health A simple list outlining the health of a project at any given time. Suggested values to use are on track , at risk , and delayed . Use a drop-down so that the investment assignee is forced to choose health on a regular basis. This will be a new custom field. Use the type Select List (single choice). sanakirja Theme Many teams use a theme to track a set of related company initiatives. We’ll use theme later on in our agile board to categorize sanakirja related investments. On a tactical agile board like many teams use, epics collect a related set of user stories. In the same manner, themes collect a related set of investments. Date Due Some teams like to track the quarter of delivery for a particular investment. You can either use the D ate due field in JIRA, or create a custom field outlining the particular quarter (Q1 2014, Q2 2014, etc.). If the latter, use the type Select Lis t (single choice).
Kanban boards are great for showing the flow of work through a process. We re using kanban instead of scrum, because work at the investment level doesn t use fixed sprints. I d also recommend keeping the workflow for investments fairly simple. Start with to do , ideation , in progress , and done . You can use global transitions between states so that it s easy to move work around on the board. JIRA tracks all of the history sanakirja of each state transition, sanakirja so it s easy to follow what happened on any particular work item.
We can create a kanban board in JIRA Agile for our new project and workflow. Map each workflow state to a column on your kanban board. You can also set work in progress limits for the ideation as well as in progress state to ensure the business isn t focusing on too many things at once.
At this point, create some investments to populate your new kanban board. It s important to see your data in the board, as it will be easier to build and customize as we go along. I d recommend creating 10 to 20 investments that we can use for the duration of this blog article. Have at least one investment in each state so that we can verify sanakirja changes to all investments. 5. Make the board awesome
Now that we have a basic board set up, let s start looking at how we can really target our audience. Senior-level managers and executives want to know several key me