Need advise on Best Practice using Jira Software (Enterprise) to manage projects and portfolio

Question

Hello!

I am taking on the role to setup our division's own Jira instance so that we can manage our projects and portfolio across teams, Jira instances (i.e. vendor, client), and departments for the division.

The division has 6 different business functional work units within the division which each team has list of projects they are working on with vendors or other department where the vendor or other departments also use their own Jira instance (... can it get more complicated than this [grind]....

Our division has a dedicated Jira/Confluence instance setup and assigned to us (a site / branch under the organization enterprise Jira subscription). We have admin access to our division's Jira instance.

The problem I am looking to solve is:

What is the best practice or how I can setup the Division dedicated Jira instance that help us with the following

* Leadership team to review and approve new projects, have transparency on resources, and track portfolio performance
* Project managers to plan, manage, and report on projects using standardized templates
* Team members can find, do, and update their work across multiple projects, whilst collaborating easily with teammates.

I have research and self trained on creating Jira issue, setup boards and using advanced roadmap, but get stuck on how to structure it correctly.  Any help, advise are appreciated.

Is there a team at Atlassian that provide services to help us with the consultation, onboarding, training, etc.?

Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Answer

Hi @Christine Nguyen

reading this part, it sounds to me that you'd like to have someone who's directly consulting you within your requirements:

Is there a team at Atlassian that provide services to help us with the consultation, onboarding, training, etc.?

That's exactly the spot where Atlassian solution partners come in. There are tons of companies around the globe which are specialized in exactly that. You can check out Atlassian's partner directory to find the one which suits you best, e.g. closest to you.

Hope that helps,
Matthias.

Chris_82qgx8 · Answer

Well this is complicated.

There are a few ways you can go about this I have been involved in organizations that either:

Create Jira Projects for each piece of software or internal project

and

Organizations that create team level Jira Projects instead of software related projects.

I prefer the team base approach, it gives each team a homepage of sorts automatically with their project view that is fairly consistent with how other teams are viewing their work.

To accomplish that:

I would create 1 Jira Project (master) to use just for the roadmap feature and or Organization wide OKRs. This is your executive view for getting projects approved and setting timelines.

Then I would make 1 Jira Project for each division team, 6 in your case.

Now lets say you create a Project X set a timeline and get consensus with your teams on what needs to get done by who in the master project and get that approved by management.

From there each team would create an Epic within their team project setting a link to the master project and possibly links to other teams Epics relating to that project.

Links are super handy to sort out what kind of work needs to happen using key words.

Blocked by, Requires, is related to, etc.

Each piece of work that a specific team needs to accomplish, becomes a story with tasks or sub-tasks within their teams epic.

The Jira Project per software project way can work, but teams would then need to create dashboards that link their teams work together so they can prioritize, because dashboards are custom I have found that different teams have different views and it can be hard to manage priority that way.

Any method I have seen requires a good amount of planning and setup. Good luck to you.