When should you create a new project

[Kimi Nakashima]

We use Jira Service Desk Cloud and I'm still a relative newbie as is the company I work for. Others in the IT department are pretty adamant that we keep the number of projects as small as possible, which to them means basically 2, a client facing external service desk and an internal service desk.

But I'm wondering, is there a best practice for when you should create a new project? I can see why they want to keep the number of projects small. We're a small company and as pretty much the only person dedicated to maintaining Jira, I don't want to have to maintain a bunch of projects. But I can't imagine that putting everything into 1 or 2 projects is a good idea either.

For example, we keep a handful of blank drives that we use to ship out client data if they request it. I've been tasked with making sure we have a certain number on hand as well as knowing where they are (in storage, being used or shipped out). According to my research, I can definitely use JSD to handle this, I'm just not sure if I should absorb this into the current internal service desk project or create a new project for this

[Brant Schroeder]

Kimi,

  Atlassian products allow you great flexibility to help your team work effectively and efficiently.  I have been a part of a number of implementations and the approach your colleagues are recommending is a good one.  From an ITIL ITSM standpoint / best practices standpoint having a more consolidated environment will allow you to more easily track, change and improve to meet your end users needs.  The internal reports, SLAs, Request Types, etc. can all be leveraged to help you do this.  What you are discussing doing could easily be accomplished with a new request type in the current project.  You might want to even create a unique issue type and workflow for it so you can be more productive.  You can adjust SLAs, queues, permissions to make the service desk work how you need it to for everyone.  I would look at implementing it into your current service desk and if it does not work you can always create a new one and migrate issues to it.