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Project - Best practices and use

Bob Boursaw

Hello,

I am pretty new to the Jira products and have a question about Projects, specifically, how they "should" be used. For example, would you expect to have a project defined for specific "things" like Proposals, Licensing, Internal, Sales and Marketing, where each of those would relate to various products you develop? To me, this doesn't seem appropriate and you should have artifacts of each of these types within a given project. Am I correct in that a project should be inclusive of an entire body of work and everything associated with that should be within the project?

Let me give an example.

We have a software product APP1

App1 has a product backlog with many issues, tests, etc.. There will be many test plans executed against it, normal stuff. Also, there will be proposals, licensing, sales initiatives, etc. all specific to this APP1. So, shouldn't ALL artifacts of all types (issues, tickets, tests, sprints, etc.) all be within this one project? It seems backwards to me to have multiple projects where some of your projects are components/artifacts of others. This feels like were creating a very messy many-to-many relationship between projects and my understanding was that a Project should encompass the entire body of work and all things related to that project.

Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.

Bob

Comments

Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_

Hi @Bob Boursaw

Jira is an Issue tracker, issue being a task or an activity that has a lifecycle.

For your use case, let us take look at them one by one.

Proposals

These are documents and will/can be in Confluence or word file or whatever editor or tool you use in the company. However you can use Jira to track the activity or lifecycle of proposal. Jira supports attachments, so you can always attach the actual file to a Jira issue or link to your document repository.

For example when a request is received to create a proposal you can create a task in Jira and assign it to the relevant person. Jira being an excellent issue tracker will help you in tracking that task. It can be assigned/reassigned to others, people can add their comments to the task if need to give their feedback. Later on you can report on things like "How many proposals sent vs won", "Proposals for a specific client" etc. For task you can have fields to track value, won/lost, client, validity etc.

Licensing

You can potentially use Jira tasks or a custom issue type to track licenses. I guess you want to storage expiry date, product, license type etc. Jira can help you with alerts if you configure it. Actual license could be stored in a text custom field and you can always have security around who can see licenses.

Internal, Sales and Marketing

A bit similar to above. You can create campaigns, assign it to others, break down campaigns further using a sub-task feature in Jira. Associate dates with these type of activities and much more.

All these can be within a project if they are all related.

Ravi

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Bob Boursaw

Jira is a tool to help your teams collaborate and manage your work items. How your teams work is how they work, and so there isn't really a "best" practice; perhaps only better/worser ones based upon the features and limitations of the tools supporting the teams.

Consider what you need to do and know to help you decide one Jira project or multiple; types of boards, types of dashboards, desired add-on products, etc. And, what you need to know in order to improve over time.

For example, you note several types of work such as proposals, licensing, sales initiatives, and probably delivery and support in your Value Stream. How do those separate things happen (workflow) and what do those teams want to know about how they work (measurement)? Is this one team that does all types of work, from concept to cash, or several teams?

If one team, one project may help. If multiple teams, or one team would find value in separate reporting (progress, lead time, etc.), perhaps separate projects could help. There are Jira features that can help as work items bridge between projects, so that is less of a constraint.

And, if you pick a direction and that is not working out for your teams, you can evolve to a different method. Perhaps start by listing what you need vs. want, and then see how Jira can help.

Thanks, and best regards,

Bill

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