Best Practices for Managing Multiple Teams with GitHub Issues and Projects (V2)

[anders-jagard]

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Hi GitHub Community,

I'm seeking advice on best practices for managing GitHub Issues and Projects (V2) across multiple teams in my organization. Here's the situation:

• Team Structure: Each team in our company has its own repositories and manages its own team backlog.
• Feature Backlog & Roadmap: I need to maintain a high-level feature backlog and roadmap that spans across these teams. For a single team, managing this is straightforward, but coordinating across multiple teams has proven to be a bit tricky.

What I’ve Tried So Far:

1. Separate Projects for Each Team: Each team has its own GitHub Project, and I created a separate overarching project for tracking features across all repositories. Initially, this seemed like a good approach because:

   • I added a "Team" field to issues and could slice by team or repository when discussing cross-team priorities.
   • It allowed for some level of granularity in managing issues.

   Challenges Encountered with this setup:

   • Not all metadata (project custom fields such as estimate, size etc.) gets copied correctly between projects.
   • During this trial there were reports from developers about issues with board-status transitions not being recorded to the issues, which led to missed/lack of history.
   • This setup started feeling overly complex and potentially unmanageable. I know we could script all updates but I do want to keep it as clean as possible.

2. One Unified Project for All Teams: I'm also considering having a single project that all teams use, filtering views by repository or similar. However, this approach raises concerns about scalability and effectiveness for day-to-day operations at the team level. Each team would like their own views I would think...

My Question to the Community:

• What am I missing? Are there simpler solutions or best practices that would help us manage issues, plan, and prioritize features across multiple teams more effectively?
• How do you handle cross-team feature tracking and roadmap management in a way that doesn’t become overly complex or prone to errors?

I'm looking for any advice or experiences you can share that might help us streamline our workflow without creating a monster of a project!

Thanks in advance for your insights.

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