Create project from template or from anew each time?

Question

Hi everyone,

I wanted to see what is the best practice regarding projects and their creation in Jira. I am the admin for Jira in the organization. Our PM department requested that I create a project for them that differs in the workflow from our other issues, so that they could manage their projects in Jira. I created a template with the following structure Initiative/Epic/Story/Sub-task. Basically normal Jira structure. :)

The thing is this: our hierarchy says that initiative is a project, and all other types are below, so every time they create a new project they create an initiative and continue their project from there. Is this a good principle, or should I create literally a new project for every project they have? Some of our subsidiaries are doing it that way, but it doesn't feel right?

Thank you.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @nebbs

I always consider the reporting needs of the company, and the admin/maintenance effort when these sorts of questions are raised.

Does your company need to do aggregate reporting of issues across the projects? If so, ensure that the projects are configured identically is crucial. Otherwise there is much work needed to normalize the data so that it can be aggregated.

If you company does not needed aggregated data reporting, then the next question to ask is how much time are they willing to spend on administering/maintaining these projects? The more variability that is allowed in the project configurations, the higher the cost of administration and maintenance for those configurations over the long term.

Even if you don't need aggregated data reporting, to reduce the cost of admin/maintenance I would encourage you to invest time in determining if there is one or a small number of standardized configurations that could be used, and then make each project with the Share Settings with Another Project option. If changes are later needed to the project configurations, this will reduce the effort.

Rilwan Ahmed · Answer

Hi @nebbs ,

If your organization is using shared configurations (i.e. similar Issue types, workflows etc.), then I would suggest to create project from shared configuration.

If not, then also I would suggest you to create project from shared configuration, create required workflows and schemes, Issue types and schemes etc. and then map it in the project settings. This will save you from Jira automatically creating schemes for each project of its own.