Engineering EPIC — A process to ease #SpreadSheetOfDeath and cross-squad initiatives

As Engineering managers, we have to deal with many stakeholders (within and external facing parties). Some of those discussions require us to propagate work downstream to one or multiple squads to work on.

Imagine a list of resources from multiple squads that need action. Like many managers we’ve tried managing via spreadsheets which is not easy to enforce for various reasons:

1. Lack of clarity. What is the definition of done?
2. What’s the timeline we’re looking at?
3. How do you communicate changes?

For a growing team like us, using Spreadsheets to keep track of the progress is no longer that scalable.

Solution

As part of improving our processes, we decided to do something about the #SpreadSheetOfDeath problem, to reduce anxiety when dealing with stakeholders and also for the squad to be more accountable for the items and resources they are in charge of.

Introducing Engineering EPIC, internally we called it the ENG ticket.

This is nothing more than just an Engineering Project created in Jira. Whereby, initiatives and work that requires attention from squads will be created under an epic umbrella.

We also added small automation to ease the creation of individual tickets that will be added to squad backlogs.

How the automation is set up

This helps us to generate issues that will appear on backlogs for squads to bring up and prioritize during the sprint planning. At the same, all relevant work is tracked under the same EPIC radar for easy monitoring of the entire initiative.

With this, we can leverage the full capability of Jira, allowing squads to collaborate and borrow implementation from each other through comments, linked pull requests, and status updates.

Outcome

So far, this implementation has worked well for both technical and non-technical tasks. This process seems promising to us as we now have more visibility and control of cross-squad initiatives.

Squads are also more responsive to the EPIC work since these tickets have already been groomed and are usually smaller in effort (transferring knowledge from experts and other squads).