Deliver strategic initiatives

Initiatives give you a high-level view of strategic, cross-team projects that can take months—or even years—to deliver. These projects are often hard to track with engineering tools because they’re spread across different boards and teams in your issue tracker. Swarmia consolidates all that information into a single view so you never lose focus on the bigger picture.

Initiatives show the big picture:

• What has already been done and what is next

• Is something stuck at the moment or at risk of getting dropped

• How many teams and people are working on the initiative

• Which team is driving the effort

Setup

Using Swarmia requires that you have your issue tracker connected. Setting up initiatives in Swarmia varies slightly depending on whether you use Jira or Linear.

Jira

For Jira, there are three ways to add initiatives. You can find each method under the "Add" button in the initiatives overview.

1. Create initiatives from scratch. Define a set of filters to build your initiative. Any issues matching those filters will be included. This method lets you create groups of issues that aren't linked to each other in Jira, making initiatives more exploratory.

2. Import initiatives from Jira. Select individual Jira issues to import as initiatives. Each issue you select becomes a separate initiative. This method works best when you have a handful of larger projects to track in Swarmia and new ones aren't created frequently.

3. Set up auto-import for Jira. Auto-import is enabled by default for new Swarmia organizations if we detect you're using the issue type "Initiative" in Jira. You can specify filters to narrow or broaden what gets imported and toggle auto-import on or off.

Linear

For Linear, there are two ways to add initiatives.

1. Import projects from Linear. Linear projects are automatically imported to Swarmia as initiatives. You’ll see them as soon as you’ve connected Linear to Swarmia.

2. Create initiatives from scratch. Define a set of filters to build your initiative. Any issues matching those filters will be included. This lets you create groups of issues that aren't linked to each other in Linear, making initiatives more exploratory.

For initiatives you create from scratch in Swarmia, you can set the description, documentation link, start date, and target date. Imported initiatives sync from your issue tracker, where you manage that information.

Using initiatives

Initiatives overview

The initiatives overview gives a high-level view of all ongoing initiatives within the organization. From here, you can dive deep into initiatives that need steering.

For each initiative following attributes are displayed:

• Start date: The planned start date or first activity date

• Target date: The planned completion date (or last activity date for completed initiatives)

• Completed: Percentage of work items completed, with a trend chart showing progress over time

• Effort: Full-time equivalent (FTE) months invested in the initiative and its percentage share among all shown initiatives

  • Includes a monthly trend breakdown for the selected timeframe

• Teams: Teams that own issues within the initiative

The completed and effort columns are filtered to your selected teams and timeframe, allowing you to focus on the initiatives a specific team has worked on and the amount of work they have remaining.

Spotting patterns in the initiatives overview

The completed and effort columns are particularly useful for gaining quick insights into project progress and which project is currently in focus. By default, initiatives are sorted by effort (highest first).

Common patterns to watch for

• Increasing scope: Within the completed column, you can see planned (grey) and completed (green) work items. Sometimes you might see that the completed % has decreased since your last visit. This is due to the scope increasing faster than items are completed. By hovering over the area chart, you can see a tooltip breaking down changes month-to-month.

• Steady progress: When planned and completed work items increase at the same pace, the completed % stays in the same range between visits. The chart can give perspective on how much work is being done, even when the overall completed percentage doesn’t change.

• Inactivity: The effort column shows the aggregate amount of FTE during the selected timeframe, while the trend column shows if there have been inactive months. This can surface a lack of focus in key initiatives.

• Winding up vs. winding down: The shape of the trend breakdown can also tell you whether a project is starting or ending. Generally, in cross-team initiatives, effort tends to be highest when multiple teams are contributing at the same time, and towards the end, most teams have already moved on to other projects.

How you interpret these patterns depends on how your development organization works and what initiatives you are tracking.

• An increasing scope mid-project might be cause for concern if your organization works more in a waterfall-like model, where work tends to be defined before starting.

• If you are tracking a strategically important initiative, months with lower than expected or no effort may be a particularly important signal.

Remember, you can use filters to surface these patterns in not just the whole organization but also individual teams. Filtering to a single team will change the completed and effort columns to just the work items owned by that team. This allows you to easily tell how a single team moves from one initiative to another over time.

Initiative view

The detailed initiative view is used to inspect the initiative's progress, find any possible bottlenecks, showcase the contributors, and display the planned work to be started. Below are some things that can be inspected from the view.

Analyzing patterns in the activity timeline

Each dot in the activity timeline represents the volume of activity on a particular day or week. One of the best indicators of a stuck or blocked initiative is long periods of inactivity. When you spot long periods of inactivity, you can investigate further why work might be blocked. It’s possible to expand individual rows in the timeline to drill deeper into specific issues. You can also click on each dot on the timeline to see all contributions that happened on that day or week as a list. This way, you can pinpoint specific issues and unblock the work.

The mismatch between the planned completion date and the unstarted work and inactivity. An initiative might contain subtasks that are idle and have not had steady activity lately or the initial plan has been too ambitious.

Drill down to individual issues and inspect their progress

The data in this view can be used to gain insights into the work being done towards an initiative. If your initiative seems to be at risk of getting stuck, you can start conversations with your team to make steady progress.

Initiative lifetime

The calculation of an initiative's lifetime differs from the issue's lifetime. The initiative counts events when marking an issue as completed or when merging the first pull request associated with that initiative. Consequently, both the first and last activities of the initiative will be counted from that point onward.