We are excited to announce the introduction of Initiatives, a new item type in Craft.io. With Initiatives, product managers can create and manage high-level, strategic efforts or large-scale working items that apply to multiple epics across multiple teams and workspaces. These Initiatives provide a valuable tool for prioritizing work, aligning teams on strategic goals, and improving communication and collaboration within the organization.

Initiatives are high-level, strategic efforts or large-scale working items that relate to multiple epics across multiple teams and workspaces. These efforts are typically long-term and can take multiple releases or quarters to accomplish.

In the context of Craft.io's Product Portfolio Management, Initiatives can be created and managed on the portfolio level by owners, admins, and editors. These Initiatives have their own unique status workflow, which can be set on the portfolio settings. They can also be visualized in roadmaps and other views to keep everyone in the company aligned on strategic goals.

Portfolio fields are custom fields that can be added to any item type in the portfolio. These fields are useful for providing additional information and context to portfolio items. Portfolio fields can be used for information that is intended for management, rather than for everyone to see, such as budgets. They can also be drilled down to workspaces for all to see.

By adding portfolio fields to Initiatives, you can provide more details about them and use the fields to slice and dice the views, filter and analyze the data in different ways. This can help with presenting Initiatives and making data-driven decisions.

Initiatives can be prioritized like other item types. to optimize the prioritization process of Initiatives add portfolio fields of different types to your prioritization scheme. For example, prioritize Initiatives based on their potential impact on revenue. By adding these fields to your methodology, you can prioritize Initiatives according to their strategic importance and make sure that the right work is being done at the right time.

Roadmaps help teams plan and organize their work, align efforts towards a common goal, and communicate progress to stakeholders. In craft.io, the ability to create roadmaps allows teams to visualize & coordinate work effectively, enabling teams to make informed decisions.

With our latest release, it is now possible to create Initiative roadmaps in Craft.io.

This allows product managers to create high-level strategic plans and keep the entire company aligned on strategic goals. By providing a clear and visual representation of the plan, Initiative roadmaps make it easier to communicate the overall strategy.

To create various Initiative views in your portfolio, select the "initiative" hierarchy level. This will allow you to visualize your Initiatives in different ways and gain insights into their progress and importance within your portfolio.

Initiatives are a cross-workspace effort that can be broken down into multiple epics for multiple teams. Breaking Initiatives into epics is crucial for ensuring that high-level strategic plans are translated into specific, actionable work items. By breaking Initiatives down into smaller, more manageable chunks, teams can better understand the tasks that need to be completed in order to achieve the overall goal and that they are working towards the same objectives.

Breaking Initiatives into epics allows teams to better understand and execute on the high-level strategy, and to track progress across different workspaces. By grouping and filtering epics by Initiative and assigning them to Initiatives, teams can make sure that the work they are doing is aligned with the company's overall goals.

To assign epics to Initiatives in portfolio management, you can use either bulk actions or drag & drop functionality. This allows you to quickly and easily connect multiple epics to an Initiative at once. Alternatively, you can use the Initiative field in the epic item properties to assign each epic individually. This flexibility makes it easy to organize and manage your epics in a way that aligns with your overall strategic goals.

Initiatives are propagated to workspaces associated with portfolio. This allows teams to create, organize and group their work to align with the product strategy. By creating and assigning epics to Initiatives within the workspace, you can add relevant epics and organize them according to your strategic goals. Grouping, filtering, and sorting can be used to view and organize Initiatives items in a specific way.

To quickly and easily align your work with the overall product strategy, you can create new epics and assign them to an Initiative, or you can assign existing epics. To ensure that the epics are aligned with the Initiative's goals, you can open the Initiative panel to view its description and validate that the connection is correct.

We hope you enjoy Craft.io’s latest features! Jump into Craft.io and try them out for yourself.

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