Multiple Projects/Backlogs for one Customer

Question

Hi,

As we are a software development company, there are customers that need multiple projects (1 for every separate product). Every project must have a separate backlog.

At the same time, I would like to be able to report on "Customer-level" to show them the progress on those multiple projects/backlogs.

I know that there are "workarounds" by using components etc. but that does not make it possible to manage multiple backlogs under 1 customer.

Do you guys have any suggestions on how this can be done?

Many thanks in advance!

Best,

Daan

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hi @d_zeven

Thank you for the provided details.

Jira does not have the possibility to add a new entity above projects, however, analyzing the details and requirements you provided, I believe you will be able to find a solution by configuring a board to display the information your finance department needs, while the teams working on the PIM implementation and webshop build will use different boards that will only display the relevant content to them.

Basically, you can follow one of the two ways below:

1 - Use a single project for each customer you have, displaying both PIM implementation and webshop build issues in that

2 - Configure your project with two Security levels, hiding the issues that are not relevant for your teams, but adding the Finance department to both levels so they can see all issues in your project

3 - Configure a board for each department you have: Finance, PIM implementation, and webshop build.

4 - An optional step would be to use components to define the issues of each department, so you could easily filter and create reports, both global or per department.

OR:

1 - Keep your Projects as they are, using a single project to define each department

2 - Configure your Finance department to access all the projects related to a single customer

3 - Configure a single board for each customer you have and allow your Finance department to access it, editing each board to display all the projects related to a single customer and naming it in a way they could easily identify which customer the board is related to

P.S: This option will have some limitations in report and Sprint planning, since the boards used by the finance department is related to multiple projects.

Following one of the ways above, your finance team will have access to the whole report in the same view but keeping the other teams to only be able to access their respective issues.

Let us know if you have any questions.

d_zeven · Answer

Hi Petter,

Thanks for your response!

If I do it like you suggest, I basically have 1 backlog that I can filter in multiple ways, right? So there is one project, and a backlog that can be filtered.

Let me try to clarify our wish:
Sometimes we have multiple projects per customer.
For instance, a PIM implementation and a webshop build.
The only link between these projects is that they are carried out at the same customer. Therefore, I don't want issues from one project to be visible in the other.

The obvious solution is to create 2 separate projects, but if I do that, it takes more time for the our finance department to do the reporting and invoicing on customer level (since they have to dive into both projects).

It would therefore be ideal if there was a way to create an "entity" above Projects. So:

Customer
Project
Boards
Epics
Stories

Is there some kind of way to make this work?

I hope this explains it more clearly, and I'll also dive into the Board Settings to check if I can make your suggestion work...

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello @d_zeven

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

I must confess that I'm not sure if I completely understood your requirement, but it seems you are looking for a way to have multiple backlog views displaying the progress for issues in multiple projects. Is that correct?

If that's the functionality you are looking for, boards can be fully customized to return the issues you want from any project you have by editing its Board filter under Board settings > General.

That being said, you can create multiple boards to have all the backlogs for all the projects you want, editing its filter query to return all the information you need (Even from multiple projects) and using the board reports to collect the data related to each board.

You can have more details about this functionality in the link below:

Configuring a board

Let us know if you have any questions. In case this is not what you are looking for, please provide us with a practical case on how you want your tasks to be displayed.