Handling multiple teams in Jira Service Desk?

Question

This is something I've gone back and forth on for a while now (well the 3 years I've been using Jira) and would like to see how other Jira administrators are approaching this.

We have an IT operations department with 6 different teams. The usual staples like Service Desk, Infrastructure, etc. We have about 100 agent licenses spread across these teams.

Do you put everyone in a single project and build queues/custom fields to separate workloads or do you have a separate project for each team? And what pros and cons have you come across?

We currently have separate projects for each team but find escalating issues through "moving" them between projects too cumbersome and the customer portal being too busy - but is otherwise good to have a clear distinction between workloads.

I've never been able to find any kind of best practice guidance from Atlassian on this but the recent Early Access ITSM Project seems to lean more towards a single project for all teams.

Matthew Gaffney · Answer

We were allowing individuals to create filters and share those with their team. Then using a bug watcher notification app to allow us to watch a filter. Each individual can opt into watching a filter. Then they had the option for email or in-app notifications.

This app only currently exists for the Server version of the product. Which is a shame as without it, I don't see how we can continue to use Jira Service Desk without having all the mess you've previously mentioned.

Reiss Snooks · Answer

We tried the whole linked issues piece for some time, but it felt like that made it even more cumbersome :(

I feel that Atlassian need to be clear on how they expect it to work and provide appropriate guidance. After all, they built the product!

PhilSpo · Answer

Hello Reiss,

I have also always adopted a separate project for each team. I found that having everyone in one project made it too messy.

There seems to be no way of hiding queues from certain users, that meant we had loads of queues that everyone could see. You cant re-order per user, so some users were having to scroll down to find their queue. etc. I did manage to colour co-ordinate and nest some queues that made it a bit easier but its still way too busy.

I ended up using automation to create linked tickets if we ever had to move them from one project to another. it kept the original ticket in one place so was easier to track.

There are pro's and con's for both for sure, but it seems sensible at the moment to keep everything separate until Atlassian develop better tools for having eveything in one project.

Phil