Understanding Initiative vs Epic: Key Differences and Best Practices
By: Hajime Estanislao, PMP, CSM; Editor: Geram Lampon; Reviewer: Dr. Michael J. Shick, MSPM, PMP, CSM
Does your agile team sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture while getting buried in the details of day-to-day execution?
The distinction between initiatives and epics is a foundation of successful Agile
Imagine if your team could work smarter, with each task driving towards a meaningful, high-impact outcome. By distinguishing initiatives and epics, you ensure every sprint, story, and task aligns with your organizational objectives. This clarity leads to increased productivity, better resource allocation, and a roadmap to success.
It is time to take control of your projects. Learn how to manage your initiatives and epics, streamline your workflow, and deliver results that truly matter.
Differentiate: Initiative from Epic
In Agile
An initiative represents a broader, strategic goal development process that aligns with the organization’s business objectives. It typically encompasses multiple epics and involves coordination across different teams or departments.
Initiatives usually span several months or even years and are focused on achieving significant outcomes like entering a new market or improving customer experience.
An epic, on the other hand, is a sizable body of work that contributes the same way to fulfilling part of an initiative. It is more focused and detailed, breaking down into smaller units called user stories. Epics manage features or functions within a project and could take weeks or months to complete.
To summarize, initiatives are the larger strategic objectives, while epics are specific, high-level tasks or features within those initiatives. Understanding the distinction helps teams prioritize work, align with business goals, and track progress at different levels.
What is an Initiative?
In Agile and traditional
An initiative typically spans several months to years, requiring coordination between multiple teams, epics, projects, and user stories. It helps maintain a clear focus on delivering value and ensuring the work done aligns with the business strategy.
Examples of Initiatives
Improve Customer Experience
This initiative could encompass several epics and project tasks, such as streamlining the checkout process, enhancing customer support, and redesigning the user interface for navigation.
Expand into New Markets
When a company wants to grow its presence globally, an initiative could include epics like localizing product content, building regional partnerships, and setting up new distribution channels.
Enhance Product Security
In response to evolving security needs, an initiative could involve developing new encryption protocols, improving authentication systems, and conducting regular security audits.
What is an Epic?
An epic is a large body of work broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks called user stories. It represents a major feature, function, or objective that takes multiple sprints. Epics are the structure to prioritize complex pieces of work, helping teams focus on delivering value incrementally through smaller stories while still working toward larger goals.
Epics are essential in keeping the Agile backlog organized. They provide a high-level overview of significant features or improvements, enabling teams to manage and track progress on larger efforts. By breaking epics into multiple stories or smaller user stories, Agile teams can focus on delivering small, functional increments while still contributing to the broader epic.
Examples of Epics:
Streamline Checkout Process
This epic could include user stories like integrating a one-click checkout, improving payment options, and optimizing the shopping cart experience to reduce abandonment rates.
Redesign User Profile Management
A company may have an epic focused on enhancing user profiles, including features like improving privacy settings, enabling multi-factor authentication, and adding social media integration to user stories.
Implement a Mobile App for Customers
This epic of the software development process might consist of user stories around creating an intuitive user interface, developing push notification functionality, and adding secure login features.
Reasons You Need to Know an Initiative from Epics
Understanding the difference between initiatives and epics is essential for aligning project efforts with business goals. Initiatives represent high-level planning, while epics break these goals into actionable parts. Grasping these distinctions helps teams streamline workflows, set priorities, and measure progress accurately.
- Better Project Alignment: Knowing the distinction helps align epics with long-term strategic goals (initiatives), ensuring the work contributes to the vision.
- Improved Prioritization: It enables better prioritization of tasks and resource allocation, as initiatives help focus on broader business outcomes, while epics break down complex features into actionable items.
- Efficient Coordination: Understanding both helps coordinate efforts across multiple teams and projects, especially in large-scale or cross-departmental work.
- Clear Communication: It promotes communication with stakeholders by providing the right level of detail at the right stage, with initiatives addressing high-level goals and epics focusing on deliverable features.
- Trackable Progress: Distinguishing between the two allows for better tracking of progress on the granular (epic) and strategic (initiative) levels, ensuring short-term and long-term goals are met.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Differentiate Initiatives from Epics
Understanding initiatives and epics contributes to effective project management and Agile practices. Initiatives represent broader strategic objectives, while epics focus on tasks or features within those initiatives.
Below are steps to help you easily differentiate between the two and ensure that your agile development and project management approach aligns with business goals and team capabilities.
1. Zoom Out to See the Big Picture
When evaluating whether something is an initiative, first zoom out and ask yourself: Does this represent a large, long-term objective that aligns with the strategic goals?
Initiatives are typically broader in scope and often encompass multiple projects or epics. This perspective will help you understand whether the work is part of an organizational push, such as entering a new market or improving overall customer satisfaction.
2. Break Down the Work into Epics
Once you have identified an initiative, the next step is to break down the work into smaller, more manageable epics. Epics focuses on delivering significant functionality or features within that initiative.
Ask: Is this a specific feature or outcome contributing to the larger initiative?
If it can be delivered in a few sprints and has a focused goal, it’s likely an epic.
3. Assess the Timeline
Timeframes offer a clue when distinguishing between initiatives and epics. Initiatives generally span months or even years as they align with long-term objectives. Meanwhile, epics usually take a few weeks or months and are broken down into user stories delivered within sprints. Look at the duration and ask: How long will this take to accomplish?
Longer timelines usually indicate an initiative.
4. Evaluate Cross-Team Collaboration
Initiatives require coordination across multiple teams or departments because of their complexity and broader scope. Epics, by contrast, tend to involve one or a few development teams.
Ask yourself this: Does this work require the involvement of several teams or departments?
If so, it is likely an initiative, whereas an epic typically requires less cross-team collaboration.
Considerations For Successfully Managing Epics and Supporting the Initiative
Managing epics within the context of a broader initiative requires careful balancing of strategic oversight and tactical execution. One consideration is ensuring every epic contributes to the success. This alignment helps maintain focus on the larger business objectives while avoiding scope creep within individual epics. Reviewing how each epic supports the initiative’s goals is critical to maintaining strategic direction.
Another factor is resource allocation. Because initiatives often span multiple epics, managing resources effectively across teams becomes essential. It includes assigning people to the right tasks and facilitating team collaboration. Misallocation of resources can lead to bottlenecks in epic completion, resulting in delays within the broader initiative.
Consider flexibility in scope when managing epics. As the initiative progresses, new insights or challenges may arise, requiring changes in the scope and structure work out of individual epics. Epics adapt and can respond to these changes without derailing the larger initiative. Encouraging teams to adopt a flexible mindset and integrate feedback loops ensures epics and the overall initiative stay on track.
How to Align the Initiatives and Epics
Ensuring initiatives and epics align in theory and drive success in your organization is essential. One of the best ways to enhance alignment is through continuous communication between stakeholders and teams.
Establish a regular cadence of meetings or check-ins where teams can update progress on epics. This will ensure these efforts are directed toward the initiative’s broader objectives. This communication will allow for adjustments, preventing drift between strategic goals and day-to-day execution.
Another powerful enhancement is to incorporate success metrics into initiatives and epics. While initiatives come with high-level key performance indicators (KPIs), adding specific outcome-based metrics to each epic ensures every task contributes measurable value.
By tracking these metrics, teams can assess whether the work supports the initiative and whether structured work delivers the expected impact, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
Leveraging Agile tools for visual alignment can greatly enhance transparency. Tools like Jira and Trello allow teams to create visual roadmaps that connect epics and initiatives, offering a clear view of how each piece of work fits into the broader strategy. By utilizing these tools effectively, teams and stakeholders can maintain a unified view of progress, ensuring tactical and strategic goals are consistently aligned.
Final Thoughts: Initiatives and Epics
Understanding the distinction between initiatives and epics is an aspect of effective project management. Initiatives represent high-level, strategic goals that span multiple epics and often involve cross-team collaboration over an extended period. Epics, on the other hand, are larger features or tasks that contribute to the success of those initiatives and are divided into smaller, actionable user stories.
By differentiating and managing these two concepts, teams can ensure that day-to-day work aligns with broader business objectives. Continuous communication and strategic resource allocation help improve the alignment and execution of initiatives and epics, driving tactical and long-term success. Mastering this distinction enables Agile teams to work more efficiently, delivering valuable outcomes that align with company goals.
References
Aha! (2024). Themes, epics, stories, and tasks. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/agile/themes-vs-epics-vs-stories-vs-tasks
Epic vs. feature vs. user story: The key differences. (2024, May 23). Agilemania. https://agilemania.com/epic-vs-feature-vs-user-story
Exner, K. (2024, February 29). What is an Agile epic? Best practices, template & example. The Product Manager. https://theproductmanager.com/topics/agile-epic/
Rehkopf, M. (2024). Stories, epics, and initiatives. Atlassian. Retrieved October 2024, from https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes
Voloshyn, S. (2022, January 27). Epics, user stories, themes, and initiatives: The key difference and examples. Altamira. https://www.altamira.ai/blog/difference-between-epics-vs-user-stories/
