Changelog · Dec 4, 2023

Gain visibility and control over strategic work with initiatives

Strategic projects can be particularly challenging to manage. The longer the project’s timeline and the larger its scope, especially with more engineering teams involved, the more complex and less transparent the process becomes. Many existing tools fall short in providing more transparency, as they typically show only a portion of the overall picture. Your issue tracker is limited to only those issues that are actively tracked with it and doesn’t account for untracked work. Gaining access to reliable data required to keep these big projects running can be quite difficult.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce initiatives, a new feature that helps engineering leaders gain visibility and control over strategic projects. Here’s what you can do with it:

• Gain an accurate view of the project timeline, scope, and progress towards completion.
• Align your plans with the actual activity tracked from across multiple tools, and identify when an initiative is idle or at risk due to longer periods of inactivity.
• Drill down to specific projects to identify problems and facilitate the unblocking of work.

Starting today, you can create and manage initiatives in Swarmia. You can also gain the same level of insight for all projects that contain child issues, including Linear projects, Jira epics and stories, and other issue types.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll also introduce the ability to add your existing initiatives directly from Jira and Linear. In the meantime, you can already do this by reaching out to us directly.

More updates

• In addition to initiatives, now you can see on track, idle, or at risk labels for all ongoing projects (including Jira stories, epics, and Linear projects). An issue is considered idle if there has been no activity for the last 7 days, and at risk if it has been inactive for over 2 weeks.
• You can now filter issues by priority anywhere in Swarmia, and use priority filters to set up investment categories or define issue ownership.
• CI insights now loads faster for all customers.