JIRA Portofolio - more than one task at the same time
Asked by Hauke Stiefel:

Hi,

i'm testing JIRA Portfolio for some days. It works fine but i have a problem with the scheduling philisophy. Maybe i misuse portfolio .. I'm pretty sure, someone can help me :smile:

A simple scenario:

* a project has two tasks and they have no dependencies. So they can be scheduled in parallel NOT one after another. And i want these tasks to be done in parallel, maybe 4 hours a day task A and 4 hours task B. Of course i don't want to plan on that level of detail, but Portfolio never allows work on two tasks at the same time!

in Portfolio i defined two epics (Task X, Task Y) and two stories each (named SubTask X.1 , X.2 ..) and assigned the same Team (kanban)

example.jpg

Portfolio schedules both Epics with Stories one after another. I do understand this, but i really want to have the possibility to let them be scheduled in parallel (of course with same enddate) by defining the same priority. I guess its a normal case that project members work on more than one task at the "same time" (day, week, ..) in real projects.

Background: I want to export JIRA issues for every story (of course with stages) with estimates and due dates and so on.. everything went fine except the scheduling, which results in unrealistic "one task per 'time'" planning.

Maybe i'm the first one with that kind of problem.. Help me :smile:

Many thanks and best regards,

HS


Answers:
author: Martin Suntinger
body: Hi, Hauke - Portfolio scheduling is focused on agile principles of highest-priority items first, thus it indeed schedules the highest prio item with the max. possible capacity, to finish it as fast as possible, and then the next one. We found it makes sense to promote this as a best practice - if there is nothing blocking the work on the highest-priority task, why should the work be interrupted by working on the second most important at the same time? However, the focus has rather been to do higher-level planning towards release dates, where in both cases (parallel or sequential), it is guaranteed that at least the total capacity until a cut-off date is realistic. The details for how the team works might anyways turn out slightly different in practice. I don't think there is a good workaround to this right now, the only things that result in parallel work being scheduled are "max resource limits", e.g. only X people can work on a story at a time, if there is more people, stories will be scheduled in parallel (you could set this to 1 in the scheduling settings and you'd see that different people will take on different tasks at each time, running in parallel), or other factors like stages or dependencies causing that the highest-prio task needs to wait a bit.


author: Aaron Haight
body: I also see this as an issue with Portfolio. I do not want to have to manage each person as it's own team. If I look at a team with 5 people, I simply want to show 2 epics being worked at the same time. No need to call out dependencies at that level of detail in a planning tool. Is there no better way to setup concurrent Epics??


author: Hauke Stiefel
body: Hi Martin, thank you for the fast response. I guess i have to think more about the combination of high.level-planning and the weekly / daily planning for every single team member. i was trying to start the high-Level planning in Portfolio and exporting JIRA issues for the stages and so on. The dimension of a stage would have been work about maybe 1-3 weeks and 1-5 team members. These Members work at different Epics which are all have stories and stage-based tickets and have to run definately in parallel. This is where my problem. There is a lot of parallel work in workshops and of course also single-sequential work. But you still answered my question, so i have to find another way to combine the "real work"-JIRA issues with the higher-level planning. Maybe create virtual Members which are small teams of people who work together instead big teams with real members.. i have to think about it.. :smile:

comments: author: Max Smith
body: Hi Hauke

Did you ever resolve this? I am having exactly the same problem of needing to do two items in parallel, but being forced to decide which is higher priority.

Thanks

Max


author: Hauke Stiefel
body: Hi Max,

no, i stopped my JIRA-Portfolio testings :(

Best regards,

Hauke


Tags: advanced-roadmaps