What are the best practices for managing work

Question

Hi.  I'm part of a team in my organization tasked with determining how we should configure our JIRA cloud instance for success as our company moves into a more agile mindset.  We are enterprise users, approximately 300 employees, and made the switch from waterfall to Agile about a year ago.

The technology and software side of our org is growing rapidly with many new scrum teams, initiatives, departments, leadership, voices, projects, etc etc.  When faced with the question on how we should structure our JIRA instance to be successful, efficient and support the needs of all involved, I feel overwhelmed at the endless variety of potential configurations (projects, initiatives, roadmaps, issue types, components, yadda yadda yadda).  While the flexibility is great, I was hoping to find a white paper or article saying "here's the best way to do it", so to speak.  Alas I've found nothing.

Does anyone know of good source of information on this front?  I thought I would be slick and Google how Atlassian themselves configure JIRA but again, no luck.

Any guidance is appreciated.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Adding to what @Dave Rosenlund  _Trundl_ I would suggest you consider the reporting needs of your organization. Are the levels of management above these teams going to want to roll up all the various teams' data for cross-team reporting? If so, then (based on my experience) I would recommend that you have the teams that need to participate in the cross-team reporting use Company Managed projects so that you can lock the projects into a shared configuration (for workflows, fields, screens, etc.) Without the shared configuration, trying to do cross-team reports becomes nearly impossible unless you want to write additional code to extract the data and then transform it so that it can be collated in a meaningful way.

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl) · Answer

Hi, @McCluskey, James.  Welcome to the community.

This is a classic "it depends" question. I.e., the best way for you is probably not the best way for her. Nearly every situation is unique or falls into a unique category of Jira users.

IMO, this is probably why Atlassian has left Jira so flexible, and why it is so popular.

If I were you I'd search for relevant books on Amazon and maybe even think about hiring one of the authors (several are Community Leaders here, e.g. @Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_  & @Rachel Wright to name just two) to help you assess your situation and plan the best way forward.

You might also want to find people who work in organizations that are similar to yours by participating in some ACE events and getting to know folks well enough to figure out who might be able to give you the right advice.

You can even look me up on LinkedIn and connect with me. Once I know more about your organization, I might be able to connect you with some organizations/people.

Hope this helps,

-dave