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Initiatives

Bodies of work bigger than an epic, across projects, with progress and a forecast from their epics.

Initiatives

An initiative is a body of work bigger than one epic, often across several projects. It has an owner, a target date and regular status updates. Its progress and expected finish are worked out from the epics you add to it, never typed in.

Open initiatives

Choose Initiatives in the sidebar. Each card shows the status, owner, number of epics, target date, progress, the health from the latest update, and the goal it supports. The list shows Planned and Active initiatives. Use the Status filter to see Completed or Cancelled ones. Guests can't open this page.

Create an initiative

  1. Choose New initiative. You need permission to edit projects.
  2. Fill in the Name. The other fields are optional: Why it matters, Owner, Status, Start, Target date and Supports goal, which links it to an objective from Goals.
  3. Choose Create, then open the initiative to add epics.

The target date can't be before the start, and the owner must be a member of the workspace.

Add epics

On the initiative's page, type an epic's key (for example SWD-12) and choose Add epic. Only epics can be added, up to 50, and each one only once. Epics can come from any project. Remove one with the cross on its row. Removing an epic, or deleting the initiative, leaves the epic itself unchanged.

People only see, and only count, epics in projects they have access to. Someone outside a private project sees the initiative without that project's epics.

How progress is calculated

  • An epic's work is its child issues and their sub-issues. Archived issues and issues waiting in triage are left out.
  • An issue is done when its status is in the done category.
  • Progress is measured in story points when at least 80% of the issues have an estimate: done points ÷ total points. Otherwise it is done issues ÷ total issues. The line shows which, for example 12 of 30 pts or 4 of 9 issues.
  • The initiative's progress adds up the work of all its epics first, then applies the same rule. It is not an average of the epics' percentages, so a large epic counts for more than a small one.

Expected finish

Each epic gets an 85%-confidence forecast from its own project's recent sprints. The initiative is likely done when its last epic is, so its date is the latest of those. With a target date, it also says whether that is within or after the target.

  • Epics with nothing left don't hold the date back.
  • If an epic still has work but its project has fewer than three completed sprints, there is no forecast, and the page names the epics holding it up.

Post updates

Under Updates, choose a Health (On track, At risk or Off track), write what moved, what is blocked and what is next, and choose Post update. Anyone who can see the initiative can post. The latest update's health becomes the initiative's health and colours its progress bar. The page shows the 20 most recent updates.

An Active initiative with no update for 14 days is flagged Update due.

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