Should my team use one project or multiple to track work?

Question

Howdy,

My team does a variety of different tasks including Jira and Confluence configurations, configurations for other systems, support for Jira and Confluence and other systems, etc.  We are in the middle of reimagining our current way of tracking all of these items.  Previously, we had three or four different Jira projects tracking our work but are considering consolidating into one project since our team is only a small group of four or five.  Any thoughts or ideas of how we can best determine how to track all of our work?

Joe Pitt · Answer

I agree with @Jack Brickey  In my experience the biggest reason for multiple projects is the permission and privacy concerns. There are lots of questions in the forum about keeping certain users from being able to see or create some issue types in a project. If the work is  logically connected and everyone can is allowed to work in all issues putting them in one project makes sense. If there is a permission issue I think the best solution is separate projects.

A management driven requirement I've seen is management wants to just look at the issue number and know what type of issue it is. If that is the case separate projects would be required for each issue type. I try to talk management out of stuff like that, but...

Jack Brickey · Answer

My thoughts:

* Think about how similar or dissimilar your teams approach work.
* Do you need different permission schemes?
* Can you live with Components as a means of separating your teams?
* Do any of the teams need to keep their info private from other teams?
* how will the project or projects be administered? Multiple admins in one project might step on each other.

It is really hard to say what is “best” for  others but I do like reusing projects where possible.