GitLab Plan Stage, 28 Mar 2022

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From YouTube: GitLab Plan How To: Epic Boards for portfolio intake

Description

Melissa Ushakov walks through how to use epic boards for portfolio intake

Intro video for organization modeling: https://youtu.be/wwPh85DSSAs

Epic Boards: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/epic_boards.html

Scoped Labels: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/labels.html#scoped-labels

Confidential epics: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/manage_epics.html#make-an-epic-confidential

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Hi y'all I'm melissa ushaka from the plan stage and today I'm going to show you how you can manage your portfolio intake process using epic boards. So I'm going to share my screen really quickly and show you my setup.

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So you can see here that I have an epic board for melissa inc, I'll link to the video where I introduce the structure of this and you can see what my breakdown is, but essentially melissa. Inc is a top-level group with a collection of subgroups representing different organizations.

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So what I've done is that I've created an epic board at this level, which is very interesting, because I can see every epic in all of my subgroups, so we can take a quick peek just so you can see.

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I have you know a very rich setup here and having a board at the top level group allows me to see every epic you can get a hint about where it's at, um like you can see in this pci compliance. It's in the banking organization and the shared services program, I'll link to the documentation on scoped labels, but I've essentially created a workflow scope labels and have mapped out what my process is for portfolio intake.

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So something that is interesting and really useful is that you can control what shows up in this board. So you can see, there's only three items here, but there's actually seven in my backlog and the reason is, is because I haven't applied a portfolio label to those items that I don't feel like are ready to be taken through the intake process.

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So let's say I'm the creator of this improved borrower onboarding- and I think this is ready to be taken through. I can just quickly go over here- apply the funnel label to it. And now, if I go back to my board and refresh this items, they're now ready for intake, so the producer of these subjects can decide basically when when they should show up, because you don't want things to show up before they're ready to be reviewed, um taking things through the status is fairly straightforward.

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Let's say I've looked at this borrow onboarding item. As I'm looking at it, I can quickly move it to this column uh to signify that it's under review.

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If I go back to this, you can see it's um updating in real time in both places, so the the person that made the epic proposal can be kept in the loop as it's going through various uh reveals um processes, and it's fairly straightforward, like I said um the in the tool, I imagine the epic review process is as complex as you wanted to make it, but you can basically drag this item across these columns to signify taking an item through a workflow now something- and that is fairly interesting- is that you can control basically what is visible at lower stages, depending on what your workflow is.

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I know in some companies you may want to keep epics under wraps until they are officially approved and gitlab can definitely help you do that. So you see for this specific one. You see an I crossed over.

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What that means is that this item is confidential, and what this does is that only members of this group of the portfolio shared services group can see this. So if there are teams beneath it, they typically will have visibility to items above first to allow team members to have strategic context. But you can choose to make things confidential if you want to eliminate noise from people before things are ready for review and I'm going to show you what this looks like for a team member.

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So I'm going to share my other browser where I have a session under a different user.

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So this user, that you see here, is a developer on the authentication authorization team. So if I go to their epics, all they can see are the themes so the highest level items they don't have visibility into any epics yet because nothing's been approved over here, I'm going to unmark this as confidential, so that it's now visible to this engineer- and let me refresh um so this item's been officially approved uh so now an engineer has visibility into it and they can see.

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Obviously this is test data, so hopefully descriptions are better for epics, but it says you know I have this item. I can see that it's available, it's created by my product manager and it's something that I can now start to decompose.

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um So if I go, let me quickly navigate back.

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If I go to my team and I start to create issues.

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I can now select 2fa authentication required for everybody and start creating issues to decompose that epic.

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Of course, this process depends on your company's process right.

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If you want to keep things hidden and under wraps until everything's officially approved, you can choose to mark epochs as confidential until they get to a specific step in your workflow or you can keep epics public and people have access them and you can solely rely on your labels representing the status so that that is the marker for teams on what um they should be able to work on uh so I'll link to a couple of documentation items here that will help you set this up for yourself, but hopefully this was helpful to show you what this process could look like for.

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