Follow the Money to Limit the Number Epics in your Portfolio

One of the downsides of using Epics to reflect work is that we end up with a proliferation of Epics, which makes it virtually impossible to visualize work in any meaningful way. What happens is that when an initiative is started all the teams involved will often create an Epic to capture their work, with the Epic being a piece of the primary Epic that is described in the Lean Business Case or whatever method you use to lay the foundation for the idea to gain approval and the associated funding. So a single initiative that involves 10 different teams will have at a minimum 10 Epics used to track their work, with people always telling me they need to create an Epic so that they get ‘credit’ for their work, which is not what Epics should be used for in most cases.

I won’t get into how the meaning of Epics has changed over time, such are the benefits of scaling and brittle tooling.

One of the first things I’ve done at organizations is to push for the reduction of Epics with a focus on aligning Epics to represent the highest level of work and funding. As I coached recently, teams should follow the money, meaning whoever is the funding group for an initiative should be the creator and owner of the Epic, and all teams involved should create their features/stories and link them to the single Epic. We want to do this so that when we are putting together a roll-up view of the initiative for a leadership review, we are reviewing the primary initiative/Epic and not 400 individual Epics. With too many Epics, we cannot have any meaningful conversations regarding how the work is unfolding as we can’t see the forest for the trees. Multiply this by hundreds of initiatives in a large matrixed organization and you have really no way to track and assess how work is proceeding.

And tools such as Jira Align further exacerbate the problem through the inability to link Epics, so even in situations where we have a large multi-year strategic initiative from which individual parts of the organization have large efforts that should be tracked as Epics themselves, we can’t provide that link to roll up reporting. One of the biggest challenges in Agile tooling is the inability to create meaningful portfolio views that can be leveraged with leadership.

So my best advice is to follow the money, whoever owns the funding for an initiative should own the creation and management of the Epic and all other supporting groups will link their work to that Epic. In situations where you need two levels of Epics, know that your reporting will be handled outside of the tool due to the limitations in linking Epics. (Note — I am not a tooling expert, my experience extends primarily to Jira, Jira Align, and Rally, there may be tools that allow linking of Epics but in general my understanding is that generating portfolio views that Program Management can leverage for reporting and tracking are not where they need to be)

If you would like to learn more about practical management for agility, contact me at michael@soundagile.com or visit www.soundagile.com