Manage multiple projects from single board

[Nickolas Karsten]

I'm newer to Jira, very new to the admin side.

My company has several projects that I take part in. To see these projects I either have to go into each project individually and expand drop downs, or navigate to 'your work' and 'go to your work page'.

At my previous job where I did not have admin access to Jira, it was setup very different and I want Jira to look like that.

So, I created a Kanban board. I would like all projects that have been assigned to me to automatically appear in this Kanban board so I can easily see things in one place. If I make changes or edits to these tasks from my board, it also makes those changes where the task is originally located. Is that possible?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

It's good to ask this one early!

Boards are not containers for issues, they are a view of a selection.  I think you already understand that the projects are containers.  An issue can only be in one project, but it can appear on many boards, so a change to it from any board will affect it in all places that it appears.

A very quick and dirty walkthrough:

1. Go to search for issues and run a search for "Project in (ABC, DEF, XYZ)" (with your projects, of course)
2. Save it as a filter with a sensible name
3. Go to any Jira Software project that is "company managed" (you can check this at the bottom left) and create a new board
4. It will ask you for a few things, including "create from where?".  Select your filter!

Only problem with this is the board exists "within" that project, and you might want to see it in other places.  You can choose to create it in another project, but if you go to the bottom of the list, there's also "personal", which means the board is not tied to a project, but belongs to you.

The other trick I've seen there is that the Jira admins had a project for tracking admin requests, changes and so-on.  They put all the cross-project boards in there, AND created an issue for each one to hold ownership, location and, eventually, usage, so they could kill off the unused ones! 

[Nickolas Karsten]

Yesssss this worked for the most part. Thank you! Looks how I want at the very least.

Now my only issue is getting my columns to work properly. For some reason I cant move any task/issue into my blocked field. I wanted to use the blocked field as an 'on-hold' or 'delayed for this reason' kind of thing. Regardless, I would like to freely drag from any field to another.

Thanks again, this was a huge help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Great!

Column-to-column moves have some complexities in the underlying processes.  A board is not a container of issues, it is a view of a pile of issues.

Each column is a grouping of status into a single column.  In most cases, there's only one status in each column, but it's not unusual to see columns with more than one status in them, especially the "done" column (to make Scrum teams work well, people need to include all the post-development status in "done", so you see the last column contain "done", "cancelled", "closed", "to be deployed" and so on)

When you move an issue from one column to another, what is happening "under the hood" is you are transitioning an issue from one status to another.

To be able to do that, you have to have 

• a transition in the workflow, linking the current status to the new one
• permission to use that transition
• validators that say it's ok to do it

So, I suspect you want to take a look at the workflow(s) in your project.  Are they set up to let you move issues between status in the various columns?   Jira tends to default to "you can move anything to anywhere", which is an excellent starting point, especially for Scrum and Kanban Agile teams, but if you can't do it, then someone has limited it a bit for some reason.