Epics, Initiatives, Stories and Tasks
- Catherine Foss (Unlicensed)
| 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
Epics are large bodies of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks or user stories.
Examples:
July 2020 Journal
2020 Renewal Campaign
CDA.org Accessibility Improvements
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
Projects in Jira are a little different than we are using currently. Projects are used to group tasks, and work similar to how epics work, but projects share a common workflow, teammates, and permission settings.
Examples:
Team-based: Content or Design
Business unit-based: A project can be based on items that are requested from a department or stakeholder
Product-based: A channel, website, or print publication
Granular: Stories and Tasks
efine the work that needs to happen on a granular level.
User stories: a customer-centric way of talking about the work we need to do. Read: user stories for marketing teams. “Marketers often receive commands to build a new campaign, write a new blog series, or explore a new social media channel with little context. The “why” of what we do, the audience we’re trying to reach, can often be left out entirely.“
Examples:
As a marketing manager, I would like A/B testing software on our website so that I can experiment with different promotions on our homepage.
As a follower of the AgileSherpas blog, I would like to have easier access to their downloadable cornerstone content so I can stay on top of new articles to share with my team.
Conceptual: Themes
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.