Portfolio Kanban signals in Jira

If you know something about Kanban and perhaps a little bit about Portfolio Kanban, you may be aware of the need to know and display two signals for your epics that will help you manage your flow of work better.

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To put things in a bit more context, my Kanban knowledge comes from the wisdom of Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh, which is captured very well in various articles and mini books available at prokanban.org. I recently attended a Portfolio Kanban course with Dan and Prateek, which was very useful both in reminding me of things I learned in the past and adding some very useful tips and practices for portfolio work management.
Here, I am focusing on two practices that help with managing the aging of portfolio work items and specifically how to address these in Jira. Even if you use a different tool, these practices apply in a very similar way (that is, if you care about the things Kanban tells us to care about).

If you have read books or articles by Dan or Prateek, you would have gathered that one of the most important things you can do to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and predictability of your delivery is managing the work item age. No surprise then that my first Jira plug-in was Work Item Essentials, which allows you to properly calculate and visualize work item age!

Now, when we look at the problem in the context of portfolio work management, there’s another element that comes into play. Of course, setting the start date and calculating age are still very important for your portfolio items (e.g., Epics in Jira), and I strongly advise you to still set this up. I have a handy article here that shows you how to do it, or you can use my free Work Item Essentials Jira app to save you some time.

In terms of portfolio items (for example, epics) that incorporate work items within them—e.g., stories—there is another signal that can be useful: the number of work items sitting underneath an epic. As with all signals in Kanban, monitoring the number of cards that are part of an epic is just another reason to have a conversation about the size of the epic, the options to make it smaller, and how the team would like to proceed depending on their understanding of the right size.
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Enough with the chatter though, let’s go straight into setting up this automation.

Here’s an image that I hope is worth the 1000 words as advertised :-).

You need to be a team admin to create automations in Jira. Once you have access, you want to set up an automation that triggers on Issue Update (and also Issue Created, but the example here is with Update). Another prerequisite is to have a numerical field that you can update. If you don’t have one, you can add a new field assuming you have admin access. It would be useful to confirm if the field you choose can be displayed on your Jira boards because that’s what makes it really useful.

The first step after that is to verify that this issue isn’t an epic because we only want to update epics when issues get added or removed from an epic. Once we’ve confirmed that, we need to have a Branch Rule—which we define for parent—and then we have to do a Lookup Issues. Don’t ask me why, but that’s how this works (it took me a long time to figure it out, and I only did because of the support link in resources!). At this step, you are required to enter {{issue.key}}.

When we do the lookup issues, we have to specify which field to edit and finally give it a value. The key value to remember is {{lookupissues.size|0}}. The |0 just says that if the value doesn’t exist, Jira will set this field to 0, which made sense in my case.
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If you have done everything right, you can enable your new rule and test it by updating a story that sits under an epic and then checking the relevant field of the epic. If it updates correctly, you should be able to display it on your Jira board like this:

I’ve had to anonymise the text on the screen, but the main point is that I have two values displayed for every epic. The top one is the one we just did in this article—the number of cards that sit under the epic—and the second one is the work item age for the epic, which you can set either using my free Jira plugin or, if you can’t install plugins, just follow the steps in this article to create another automation.
Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions :)

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Resources

1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Smart-Value-to-display-the-sum-of-child-issues-linked-to-an-epic/qaq-p/2311631
2. prokanban.org