Separate Boards for Each Department?

Introduction:

Hello everyone, I am here because I want to make sure that the Jira setup for my company is excellent. I am pretty new to Jira administration and a little confused about how I would go about accomplishing what I want with it. The idea I am going for is to minimize the company's and client's frustrations by setting Jira up in a way that unifies the way we all work with each other.

What I am looking to accomplish:

What I am looking to accomplish may seem a bit complicated. So I will do my best to break things down in a way that is as simple and clear as possible.

The Process:

After talking to a client and setting up a project in Jira we have multiple departments.

Web Production,

Creative,

User Experience,

Database,

Marketing

Dependant on the project we want to be able to set things up so all departments can track issues specific to their department without the overwhelm of other departments having stuff in their board.

So for example, we might have a pizza restaurant website project that the company is working on, let's call this project "Terry's Pizzeria". But each department will only get what they need to work on keeping things crisp and clear I will call these "SubBoards".

The Main Board ( All Terry's Pizza Issues ) - Used to see how far all departments have gotten with regards to a given feature. Creative may not have created the banner, so web production needs to wait for that to be created before they can code it. This is the area all departments work together and can see each other's progress.

The SubBoard:

Web Production - Only sees web-related issues

Creative - Only sees design-related issues

User Experience - Only sees user experience design related issues

Database - Only sees database related issues

Marketing - Only sees marketing related issues

However, I would want this to be a universal thing so that as we gain new clients I don't need to re-configure all of Jira to have the correct tickets go to the correct people.

Is this possible? How would I go about doing this? Components don't work cause those are more of a status thing, project setting and board settings also don't seem to have anything to organize things like this.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I would also be willing to watch through a course material if anyone knows of a good video learning resource that will teach me all this without costing me an arm and a leg (Most Jira courses are 1000s of dollars).

Thanks in advance.

1 answer

0 votes

Hi @CASEY WOELFLE

Just to confirm:

You have multiple clients your teams work with.
I'm assuming you create a Jira project per client.
Each main board will visualise all of a client's issues
Each sub-board will visualise all the work a specific team is working on - but this might be for multiple clients at the same time.

^ If the above is correct, this is a few things I'd consider doing:

Projects:

Have one Jira project per client.
Use Classic Projects - these will allow for the one team board, multiple projects approach.
I would streamline configuration across all projects. This means all projects would share one workflow scheme (i.e same workflow per issue type), one issue type screen scheme, field configuration, permissions, etc. This means making a modification to a workflow (for example), flows across all projects at the same time - useful when working on lots of different clients with similar deliverables.
Use a simple set of issue types shared across all projects - eg. Epic, Story, Task, Bug, Sub-Task. The "Team" will visualise if it's a technical or business-level work item.
To aid with project creation, I would create a "template project" - this means when creating a new client project you could check the box "Share settings with an existing project", to minimise setup administration.
See more on project configurations on this page.

Team Field - Option 1:

Based on the multi-project approach, you create a custom field - a Select List (Single Choice).
This field is a drop-down - which you could place on the screens that all projects share. You could use this during issue creation to assign issues to a "team" - and as it's a global field, use it once in a board filter without having to modify it each time.
If there are unique identifiers at creation, you might be able to automate population of the Team - eg. based on assignee. See more on automation on this page.
See more on custom field creation on this page.

Team Field - Option 2:

Another custom field option is to use a Group Picker (single group).
Via Jira Settings > User Management, you can create custom groups - so each team could be a user group with the actual team members within it.
Like in "Option 1" - this field could be added to the screens that all projects share - and used to visualise which team is working on what on boards.

Main Client Boards:

On the main client boards - I would consider either splitting the work into swimlanes based on JQL queries for the "team" field - so it's easy to see what each team is working on - or using quick filters so each team can talk about their specific tickets.
You could also use card colours to show different teams.
If an issue is blocked by another team, you can right-click the card and add a flag. This shows it is blocked and will be a talking point for inter-team stand-ups.
You could also consider linking dependent issues together (eg. blocks / is blocked by) and using quick filters to show where these blockers exist - another method for highlighting delays or dependencies!
See more on board configuration on this page.

Team Boards:

Limit issue visibility based on the custom Team field - so issues tagged under team "Marketing" will show up regardless of which project it comes from.
Similar to above, you could use swimlanes, quick filters or card colours to visualise different clients

Team Profiles:

You can also create teams via people's profile pages
Go to People on the top navigation bar, then press the "Start a team" - create it, and add users to it
As far as I know you can't use these teams in a field - but you can @mention a whole team (rather than one user at a time), see what the whole team is working on from one location, etc
See more on Team Profiles on this page

Dashboards & Gadgets:

I would consider having a dashboard for summarising the progress of each team
For example, if teams work in sprints you could have a sprint health gadget per team board
Or, you might want to visualise blocked issues per team - so you have a central view to manage risks from.
See more on Dashboards on these pages

Learning:

See the free training catalog for training you can take at no cost!

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Let us know your thoughts - if there's anything in here you think sounds useful but you're not sure how to configure it, reply back and I'll be happy to help :)

Ste