Single space supporting multiple affiliates - Best Practices Question

[Paul Liebrand]

We operate a single service space/project to manage IT requests for six different affiliates we support. Most request categories are consistent across affiliates, but a few affiliates have unique questions/requirements for onboarding/offboarding workflows.

I'm looking for guidance on best practices for structuring request types and forms in this scenario.

Which approach is recommended:

Single request type + conditional form fields
Use one onboarding (and offboarding) request type, with conditional sections/fields that appear based on the selected affiliate.

OR

Separate request types for affiliates with unique needs
Create a standard onboarding request type for common requirements, and additional affiliate-specific request types only where requirements differ.

If option #2 is recommended, should we use Organizations to segment affiliates and limit/assign request types by organization (or otherwise tailor what each affiliate sees)?

Any recommended patterns (including maintainability and reporting considerations) would be greatly appreciated.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello @Paul Liebrand 

There is not one single Atlassian best practice for this design, so this is more my recommendation based on maintainability than a hard product rule.

My usual approach would be:

1. keep one standard onboarding/offboarding request type for the common process
2. use conditional fields / form sections for smaller affiliate differences
3. only create affiliate-specific request types where the requirements are different enough that one shared form becomes difficult to maintain

For Organizations, I would mainly use them if you need to control which affiliates can see which request types, since Jira Service Management supports restricting request types to selected users, groups, customer accounts, or organizations.

So from my perspective, the sweet spot is usually: shared request type for the common path, separate request types only for real process differences, and Organizations/restrictions/Security schemes where visibility needs to differ.

Again, that part is my design judgment, not an official Atlassian rule. Atlassian provides the building blocks such as request types, forms, restrictions, and portal groups, but the final structure depends a lot on how different your affiliate processes really are.

We can provide some advices, choice is yours depending on business needs. 🤠🤗