When choosing a template for new project, what are actual differences between the templates?

[Edgar Smeets]

Hi all,

I am trying to find out the actual differences between the 'Business project' templates to choose from: Project Management / Process Control / Document Approval.

These I cannot easily find in the balloons that fill when selecting 'what is in this', as these appear to be quite similar. 

Will this choice influence the way I can make the workflow, or the addition of custom fields perhaps? Once this choice is made, and I regret this, can I go back to make another choice work?

Thanks, Edgar

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Annoyingly, the template selection used to show you the workflow and hint at what fields were there by default.  Now there's just some blurb about generic "using the project" rather than "what is set up for you"

The good news is that the templates are not wildly different, and the projects can easily and safely be changed later.  Bad news is you can't re-apply a template directly, but there's nothing to stop you re-configuring a project so that it looks like you used a different template.

The main things are:

• Boards and portals - Software projects can have different boards and the templates will create them differently.  You can always add another board, or reconfigure the project later.  Service-Management projects have portals in front of them, again you can totally reconfigure these after creation.  Core projects have non-configurable board (it just follows the project settings, so you don't need to think about these)
• System fields - a template will hide some fields if the type of project doesn't need them, but you can always re-add them to the screens or unhide in the field configurations
• Custom fields - the templates only work with app specific custom fields.  Scrum projects for example, will need sprint and default to story-points, both custom fields added by Jira Software.  Again, show/hide/add/remove later, all fine
• Workflow - left till last because it's the most painful to explain and change.  The template will create a workflow of a certain shape for itself.  I think most templates give you different workflows.  After creation, you can swap to other existing workflows, create new ones and swap to them, or, if the changes are not too structural, edit the newly created workflow to suit (and yes, you can easily change one workflow to be identical to one that would have been created if you'd used a different template).  But changing workflows drastically can mean you have to migrate too - if you remove a status from a workflow while an issue is in that status, you'll need to tell Jira what status to swap the issues in it to.