How to Manage a Shared Jira Instance with Multiple Service Providers and a Shared Customer

Question

Looking for some guidance.  We are a service provider working with an enterprise client.  We have a Jira instance and a project that we have invited our customer to so that they have shared visibility to our agile work.  Our customer is heavily involved in UAT verification activities on our project.

Our customer has also engaged another service provider and we are discovering that there is overlap between our work and theirs and we need to work together to deploy changes  to shared environments and meet our customer's needs.  We need some way of managing both our work streams but also giving our shared client visibility to the work that is underway.  Currently we are using spreadsheets to manage the "overlapping" work.

I have been exploring federated Jira environments and am not sure if this is the avenue we should pursue or if there is a better option:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/federating-jira-managing-multiple-instances-961257360.html

Any guidance or past experience would be greatly appreciated!

Esther Strom · Answer

Welcome to the Community, @Michelle Cvetkovic !

Federated instances are server-based; your ticket is tagged as Cloud. If you're in a Cloud instance, do you use SSO? Do you have other clients who access the instance, or is this the only one?

In general, best practice if you're going to go with a single instance is to create a security group for each customer or set of users who need the same access, then set your project roles using the groups. So if you use a single permissions scheme, you want to make sure that none of the project or issue-related permissions are set to all logged-in users, but rather to a user role. You'd then assign the correct security group to that role in each project to make sure that each partner/client can only access the projects and issues they should be able to view.

This solution is possible for both server and cloud installs.