Is there a way to mimic tasks from multiple jira projects into one?

[Sam Reilly]

I'm trying to take the main tasks from different projects and add them into an overarching project (without creating a dashboard) that can be update as the different projects update. Is there a way to do this since cloning doesn't update the tasks? Would it be possible to do this with ScriptRunner?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Sam Reilly 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Can you provide more information about why you want to duplicate the issues into another project? You indicate that you would want them to stay synchronized with the original issues. What do you want to do with those copies of the issues that you can't do with the original issues in the original projects?

[Sam Reilly]

Each project is used for a different team and has their own issue. The new project is a leadership project that would track issues from the other projects and have it's own issues added on as well. I want the issues from the previous projects to stay synchronized so that as they update on the team project they will also update on the leadership project.

[Trudy Claspill]

What type of projects are you working with?

Team Managed or Company Managed or both?

Software, Service, Work Management, or a combination?

Depending on your answer, one solution could be to create a project for the separate leadership issues, and then simply create a Board that combines issues from all the projects into one view.

[Sam Reilly]

We mainly have team managed projects and a combination of types. I suggested creating a board, but so far it hasn't been approved and I was asked to look for an alternative that would just stick with a project.

[Trudy Claspill]

The challenge you will face with that solution is that Team Managed projects are all intended to be independently configured by their Project Managers. They don't share configuration elements (all though there has been a recent change to allow them to share fields). When you clone those Team Managed project issues into another project you may run into problems trying to map field items from the various projects into matching fields in your overarching project. 

Additionally, the configuration of the Team Managed projects can change without notice. Sure, you could create automation rules to keep synchronizing data from the source project issues to the overarching project issues, but that could break at any time if the project manager of the source project changes the configuration to add/remove workflow statuses, issue types, fields, or values available in dropdown lists.

And then there is the risk that changes are made to the copies of the issues in the leadership project. Are those supposed to be posted back to the source issues? If not, then the changes may be overwritten by a change in the source issue.

Can it be done? Yes, but it will be a maintenance nightmare, and will take significant effort to set up initially.

In my opinion more effort should be put into defining the problem that is trying to be solved. What information is needed by leadership about these team projects? Do they just need to view the current data, or do they want to be able to change  copies of that data without impacting the source data (and if they do, why?)? Why is creating a board that references the source issues not an acceptable solution?