What’s the best Jira setup to manage a backlog(s) across departments?

[Peter Nistrup]

I work at a consultancy with <100 employees. We have three departments and want to adopt JIRA to orchestrate our internal activities and initiatives, i.e. non client-work.

Our goals are:

• A shared, transparent view for the department heads to do reporting/monitoring across departments.
• A place for employees to coordinate internal activities and initiatives (either on a shared board or individual boards).

It's very likely that employees from different departments will collaborate on the same tasks.

Which setup would you recommend, one shared project/board, three separate projects/boards, or a hybrid (single intake project + three department delivery projects, etc.)?

At surface level one single project/board seems to be the simplest and easiest approach but I'm unsure how that scales. Part of internal efforts is product development, as such we need a way to filter on product as well as department and maybe more.

We’re aiming for maximum transparency with minimal admin overhead; any tips on key fields/filters to keep the shared overview clean are appreciated.

[Benjamin]

HI @Peter Nistrup 

Welcome. From a high level, I would setup 4 boards. One for each department and one board that has full visibility for all projects. The reason for this is to allow teams to narrow down the focus. Having everyone looking at everything all at once and most of the items don't relate to them can be overwhelming and cause lots of unnecessary noise.

Of course, split on what fits best and how teams are form. For example, you have a team that is working on new product, you may want to a dedicated board for that team to focus only on task related to the new product. At the end of the boards are really a filtered visualization of issues. So, slice the pie as you see fit for the organization. If something doesn't work, change the filter. Sometimes it's an experiments on what works best for the team.

All the best.