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Any recommendations on Kanban boards techniques and managing dependencies across epics in a single product?

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Sheela Colluray Exton, Pa, United States
1. Tried and tested Kanboard techniques
2. Epic dependency management (apart from tagging dependency in JIRA which does not create any alerts of delays, manual data analysis is required)
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Andrew Soswa Technology leader| Leading global financial institution Elk Grove Village, Il, United States
Aug 07, 2020 4:44 PM
Replying to Sheela Colluray
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Thanks for the response, Andrew. VersionOne sounds interesting. We don't use that within the bank.

I will follow the guideline you provided for user stories. Just that some of my products are such that I am relying on cross channel partners who have their way of listing Epics which are too many as I feel. Mine would be 2-3 Epics as part of their larger initiative which makes it tricky to map dependency. However, I will try the method you have described for my epics set.
Thank you for providing more information that you have multiple vendors. I did not fully catch that before. It appears that you have a real coordination issue at hand.
Here is what I would do:
1. Understand whether the vendor delivers MVP (in Agile style) or fully-completed product (in waterfall style). Their delivery style will help you plan the releases to your stakeholders/customers
2. For each vendor, assign one swimlane, in their swimlane list all Epics
3. Break Epics into user stories.
4. Create dependencies between user stories in various Epics
5. Find out your critical path and release path
6. Update status daily

Without an automated tool - it will be a really difficult to properly track, ensure delivery, and report to stakeholders and you'd have to be really good at updating status daily (since I doubt that all vendors would have same release cadence)
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Sheela Colluray Exton, Pa, United States
Aug 07, 2020 4:44 PM
Replying to Sheela Colluray
...
Thanks for the response, Andrew. VersionOne sounds interesting. We don't use that within the bank.

I will follow the guideline you provided for user stories. Just that some of my products are such that I am relying on cross channel partners who have their way of listing Epics which are too many as I feel. Mine would be 2-3 Epics as part of their larger initiative which makes it tricky to map dependency. However, I will try the method you have described for my epics set.
That is super helpful. The internal tool we use is JIRA so I have my own Kanban board and Confluence page is where I map dependencies as it is easy to integrate JIRA. A bit of manual set up but don't see any other way like the automation tool you mentioned.

I try to tag dependency labels for my Epics in JIRA but the problem comes with data integrity with delayed status updates from other teams who are the owners of the Epics...
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