Initiative | Project | Epic | Story | Task | Subtask | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Purpose | High-level goals set by leadership | Separate/group tasks by business unit or team | Shorter term goals; each epic contains several tasks | A way of phrasing a task to make it more audience-focused | Granular, actionable work item that must be produced to achieve a goal | Break down a task into smaller work efforts, such as by different team members/roles |
Number in system | 4-8 | 5-20 | Several epics for each initiative | Several stories for each epic | Several tasks for each epic | A handful for each task |
Time length | Usually completed within the year or sometimes longer | Not time bound; could remain open forever | Ideally 1-4 weeks; some may remain open longer | Week or less to complete | Week or less to complete | Same as a task or story, or shorter |
Displays on roadmap? | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No |
Displays on Board? | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
High-Level: Epics and Initiatives
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Initiatives are collections of epics that drive toward a common goal. In many cases, an initiative compiles epics from multiple teams to achieve a much broader, bigger goal than any of the epics themselves. While an epic is something you might complete in a month or a quarter, initiatives are often completed in multiple quarters to a year.
Examples:
Content as a Product
Digital Transformation
Member Retention
Resource Management & Capacity Planning
Process: Using Projects in Jira
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Themes are an organizational tool that allows you to label backlog items, epics, and initiatives to understand what work contributes to what organizational goals. Themes should inspire the creation of epics and initiatives but don’t have a ridgid 1-to-1 relationship with them. A theme for a rocket ship company would be something like “Safety First.”
A good use of themes could be to identify items from the department goals or strategic plan.
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