Deliver strategic initiatives

Set up your initiatives to enable visibility beyond team-level work.

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 of the bigger picture.

Initiatives show the big picture:

• What has been already 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

1. Navigate to Initiatives
2. Add a new initiative or import an existing one from Jira

3. Provide the initiative's basic information and link any relevant resource to it. You can provide the initiative's target start and end dates, but they are not required.

4. By setting up your automated issue filters, you can assign work to your initiative based on certain criteria. We support a variety of filter options for issue data.

Using initiatives

The initiatives listing view allows for a top-level overview 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:

• In progress time of how long an initiative has been ongoing since the first activity

• Health badge displaying if the initiative is on track, idle, or at risk. The health is based on when the initiative had the latest activity:

  • On track when the initiative has had activity within four days

  • Idle if there has not been activity for four days

  • At risk if there has not been activity for over two weeks

• Progress bar displaying the completed vs total of planned issues within an initiative and its child issues

• Start date displaying the planned or first activity date

• Target date displaying the planned target date or the last activity date for completed initiatives

Analyzing activity patterns

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.

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 contributors that happened on that day or week as a list. This way, you can pinpoint specific issues and unblock the work.

The mismatch between planned completion date and 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.

From the activity tooltip, you can see the ratio of done work for the time period

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.