Epics and Projects Might Break My Goals

I am struggling to connect my halfway-up-the-mountain projects to the actual work my team is doing and documenting on Jira via user stories, tasks, and some epics.

For some time, I’ve been pushing my managers to create epics that tie into my worldview, but I come to realize that I’m creating unnecessary overhead for them and forcing them to group tasks in unnatural ways for their own teams.

Thing is, I need to connect my view of projects and goals to other work. At this point, I’m thinking to go either of two ways: creating a simple Excel in which I’ll list out the goals and projects as I see them, and having my managers put the Jira keys of the best representative task, user story, or epic by month. The other way is to actually give Jira goals of functionality a go.

I do feel that there is a virtuous circle in the exercise, because if there’s stuff they’re working on that doesn’t fit any of my list of our projects, either I am missing one, or we might be misaligned.

I sometimes miss the open nature of past lives that were less formal. Thinking about this stuff is such a cog in the machine setup, but it’s the nature of the beast. I do my best work in communicating their efforts when I create a translation layer between what we’re doing into corporate synergy-sounding projects.