🔍How to Track All Changes Across Multiple Jira Projects at Once

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When you have multiple Jira projects being managed simultaneously, you’ll probably have noticed such a familiar problem: it is difficult to track all the changes that have happened across the teams, work items, and workflows.

Who updated a priority field? And when was a ticket moved in “Done"? Which work items were deleted or reassigned last sprint? These questions are frequently asked in case of audits, retrospectives, or compliance inspections.

Although Jira offers a work item-level history view, it is not as useful in cases where you require a cross-project view. It is possible to see what happened within one work item, but not what changed across multiple projects. In large companies, it requires the manual opening of dozens of work items (or hundreds of work items) in order to get the history data. It is ineffective, fallible, and almost impossible to scale.

So, what options do you have? Let’s find out.

Why Tracking Changes Across Jira Projects Matters

Jira work items are continuously changing. Fields are updated, tasks are changed to new statuses, and are reassigned by team members. When it happens on numerous projects, it is difficult to track everything at once. However, change tracking is essential to enhance transparency, compliance, and collaboration. And it’s better to have a possibility to track all the changes related to multiple projects in one place. Here’s why it matters:

1. Stay ready for audits quickly. In such industries as finance, IT, or healthcare, it is necessary to show who made changes to what and when. An easily tracked Jira history keeps you in check and audit-ready without searching through hundreds of work items.
2. Improve team visibility. It is important to know exactly why something changed in Jira. When the updates are visible in all projects, it becomes a source of trust and accountability. It is easy to see who has updated a field or closed a work item.
3. Learn from past changes. History data helps teams improve their efficiency. The answers to the questions like: which are the projects that have the most reassignments?, is there a change of priorities?, are work items closed too early?, help to plan more effective sprints and workload balancing.
4. Saving time for admins, managers, and auditors. Without a unified view, tracking changes means lots of manual work. One change log with all projects helps to save hundreds of hours every week and minimize errors.

Limitations of Jira’s Native History View

Jira maintains a history of all changes made to work items. You can open one and see who updated it, when, and how. That's useful, but if you're handling a lot of projects, it's not enough.

Here’s why:

1. You can only see one work item at a time. The history view is built in for the work item. To go over changes in a number of projects, you'd have to open them one at a time.
2. No visibility of the complete cross-project. You can't view a list of all changes for all of your Jira projects. There's no central view to keep track of who changed what in multiple projects at a time.
3. No export or reporting. Jira doesn't allow you to export the full history of the changes. If you need data for an audit or report, you have to manually collect the data. 

4. Limited filtering. You can't filter Jira's history by user, date, or certain fields, making it difficult to measure trends or analyze activity.

That's why many Jira users try using JQL to dig deeper, but it too has its limits.

What You Can Track with JQL (and What You Can’t)

JQL is useful for searching work items in one or multiple projects. It's excellent for identifying which work items changed, but not how they changed.

Here are some examples you can use:

• to get work items updated in a project last week:

project = MARKETING AND updated >= -7d ORDER BY updated DESC

 

• to receive the list of work items updated over the last two weeks across several projects:

project IN (MARKETING, DEVS, MANAGEMENT) AND updated >= -14d ORDER BY updated ASC  

 

• to get work items in a project where the status changed to Done:

project = MARKETING AND status CHANGED TO "Done" AFTER -30d

• to find work items in the specific project where the assignee changed in the last 14 days:

project = MARKETING AND assignee CHANGED AFTER -14d

 

These queries can help you filter work items by projects, but JQL still can’t show:

• old vs new field values
• who made each change
• deleted work items
• a full exportable history

That's where Issue History for Jira app by SaaSJet comes in: a fully-exportable change history for all projects, which can be filtered by date, user, or field.

How to Track All Jira Project Changes in One Place

If you want to see all changes from multiple Jira projects, you need some tool that automatically collects all updates. That's what Issue History for Jira by SaaSJet does.

This takes only a few minutes to set up and start using:

Step 1: Install the app

Go to the Atlassian Marketplace and install the app. It works for both Jira Cloud and Data Center versions.

Step 2: Select the projects you want to track

After installing, open an app from Jira. Select one or several projects. You can track all of them in one unified table.

Step 3: Filter the changes that you need

Use filters to narrow down on what is important: by user (see what has been modified by a specific teammate), by date range (select a week, month, or custom range), by field (monitor changes on status, assignee, priority, or custom fields).

You can easily combine filters. For example, get all work items updated by Emily Johnson in the Marketing project last month: 

Here, we selected work items by specific project, updater, and date range. 

Or, suppose, you need to get a list of all work items that were reopened or are in the status blocked this month in a few projects in Jira:

Here, we selected work items by JQL (project IN (MARKETING, DEVS, QA) AND status IN (REOPENED, Blocked) and chose the needed date range. It helps to understand who was responsible for the status transition and when exactly it happened. 

Or, imagine that you have to get the information related to the tasks that were moved from one project to another this month:

Here, we selected the work item by required project and date range. In the Columns menu, chose the Project field that shows the transitions of work items between projects if they happened.

So, Issue History for Jira app allows you to see all the project changes in one table and get the info on field changes, their old and new values, who made the changes, and when they happened.

Unlike Jira’s native view, you can see everything in one place across all your projects.

Step 4: Export the generated reports

Need to share the data? Export your filtered change history to CSV or Excel in a single click.

✅ Try Issue History for Jira app
Track every change across all Jira projects in one place. Install from the Atlassian Marketplace →

Summing Up

It may be difficult to monitor all changes in several Jira projects. Inbuilt Jira history and JQL may assist a bit, yet they don’t present the entire picture, who changed what, when and where.

You can have that visibility with Issue History for Jira app by SaaSJet. It gathers all updates of all the projects on a single simple view that is ready to be filtered, analyzed, or exported to audits and reports. Want to have a better control, quicker insight and easy compliance, try it now.