Best Practice: When delivery is attached to multiple ideas

[Tere Pile]

Our current process requires 1 idea: 1 or more Delivery items (prefer epic level).  We also allow many epics to 1 idea if it's a larger effort or multiple 'teams' working an item. 

However - the question is Jira allows 'me' to attach more than 1 idea to work item.  So why is it not allowed.  The simple answer is our process related to reporting & visibility.  Inflating effort, value, potentially disconnected timelines. No real 'dependency' view (other than custom field).  Essentially Delivery Status becomes an irrelevant field if I don't 'merge' ideas.  And if I merge, I 'may' lose the timeline tracking I'm trying to show between core development areas. 

I get the pain point for teams; I guess I'm just curious what others do.  

[Hermance NDounga · Accepted solution]

Hey Tere, 

I'm not sure I fully understand your question:

"However - the question is Jira allows 'me' to attach more than 1 idea to work item.  So why is it not allowed. "

You can attach several ideas to a work item and several work items to 1 idea. 

Could you please rephrase what you are trying to do and cannot? 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Sr. Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Tere Pile]

@Hermance NDounga sure - clearly poorly worded: 

Idea 1 > Delivery includes 3 epics / Delivery status counts: 8 | 30 | 40 

Idea 2 > Delivery is 1 epic / Delivery status counts:  2 | 10 | 5

Idea 2 'delivery' epic is also in Idea 1 - essentially (at least for us) this means values are duplicated/inflated causing incorrect reporting as epic is being counted twice.  Team isn't delivering 4 epics, they are delivering 3.  

The 'allows' statement is related to +Idea from the epic, if one is already attached, why allow a 2nd? 

Or could JPD caution (at minimum) Delivery item is already applied elsewhere

[Hermance NDounga]

Oh I see! thanks for elaborating. We prevent you to add twice the same epic to one idea, but we couldn't check all delivery items linked to all ideas everytime you'd use the "link jira work item button", in terms of performance it would be a bad experience. Also, in some cases, some of our customers want to attach the same epic to multiple ideas simply because this epic will unlock multiple ideas. 

I think in your case, the way we are designing the hierarchy solution, is that if the only epic in idea 2 is actually and epic that unlocks idea 1, then it means idea 2 is a "subtask" of idea 1. 
So using hierarchies, you are able to link them as follows Idea 1 > Idea 2 . 

What we will soon be exploring in hierarchies is how all values from ideas "below" a bigger one can be rolled up and added to at the level of the big one, and more as a dependancy - not as duplicates. 

Cheers, 

Hermance

[Christos Markoulatos]

Hi @Tere Pile 

If multiple ideas contribute to one large delivery item, create an Initiative (or a higher-level issue type) and link each idea to that Initiative instead of the Epic. Also use placeholder epics

• If multiple ideas share one Initiative, create lightweight Epics for each idea that roll up to the Initiative.
• These Epics don’t need full detail, they exist to maintain linkage for reporting and Delivery tab views.
• Helps avoid merging ideas while preserving timeline granularity.

Its not perfect but i believe this is the best u can do right now

Hope this helps!