Intro

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” - W. Edwards Deming (Management Theorist)

Decisions to make

• Determine what attributes should be collected for a feature, epic, and theme (e.g. source, customers, etc.) to help make decisions around the work
• Define which attributes should be required when creating a feature, epic, and theme

Context

• Sometimes program leadership teams are working with the portfolio leadership team to standardize the way that features are captured across all programs in the portfolio
• Sometimes program leadership teams define their governance practices, which dictate which specialized views of the work are needed (e.g. by customer, by functional area, by category, etc.)

Why we care

• In addition to just making the feature work visible (i.e. status), program leadership teams (and portfolio leadership) want to track trends in the kinds of work being done

The Atlassian view

• Jira Align presents different views of the distribution of work at the program level to support conversations on guardrails for different kinds of work
• Feature roadmaps can be filtered by different categories (e.g. requesting customers) to offer specialized views for specific audiences
• Out-of-the-box, Jira Align offers many possible attributes for features which can later be configured to reflect the needs of the program leadership team
• Some of the dropdown choices on fields are customizable (e.g. feature category), while others are not (e.g. source type)
• Default attributes on a feature, epic, and theme can be hidden (if not needed)
• Default attributes on a feature, epic, and theme can be made mandatory (value is required to be able to save the feature)
• While there are some native views of the features by attribute (e.g. Investment vs. Actuals, Investment Distribution Report), custom views and pivots will require the additional BI solution (Enterprise Insights)