Seeking Advice on How to Structure Jira Environment for a Analytics Consulting Services Company

Karl Diethrick

Background

I joined a small consulting company consisting of 10-20 data architects and business intelligence developers last year.  The team uses Jira to manage support tickets, requests, and projects for clients.

We were later acquired by a larger firm and are now operating as a business unit within the larger org.  The other business units are also using Jira, but each in their own way. 

For example, one of the other business units sells a software product, so they use Jira from a more traditional, product development standpoint to manage updates, version, and new features and releases.  However, we are all on the same Atlassian Cloud instance and we all use Tempo for time tracking.

Request

I am looking for recommendations (or links to suggestions) on the best way to structure things.  I read some of the Agile stuff on the Atlassian site, and have a general understanding of the Project-> Epic -> Task -> Sub-Task hierarchy in Jira.

I'll highlight how we are doing things now, then share a few requirements for how we'd like to be able to do things going forward.

Current State

• We have dozens of clients.  We have one Project in Jira where we create an Epic for each client.  Within each client's default Epic, we create two tasks.  One for Support, and another for Account Management.  These are self explanatory, and are where we log time for minor support issues, recurring general meetings, administrative tasks, etc.
• We then have a 2nd project where we record most of our consulting work.  In this project, Tasks are created as needed and tagged with a Client Epic from the other project above for organizational purposes.
  • Interrelated tasks are handled using the Jira features for linking tasks including "blocks" "is related to" etc.
  • If a client has a small to medium sized project, we usually create a project task, and then list various sub-tasks beneath it.
  • For larger projects, some have recently started spinning up entirely new Jira projects to handle them.  This provides a lot more project management features, hierarchy depth, and flexibility, but it's also a bit "wild west" right now with the creation of various projects in our instance where there was previously only the 2 above.
• At the end of each month, Accounting simply runs a report in Tempo by Epic to see what they need to bill each client.  Although we have to remind them about any extra projects we may have created for certain clients.

Desired State

To avoid stepping on the toes of other Business Units, but remaining part of our existing Atlassian cloud instance, I'm guessing we would want to create our own project template(s).

I'm looking for input on how to set things up such that we could do the following types of things:

1. A more agile approach with Kanbans and Weekly Sprints, but still being able to use the same team of resources across various clients' work.
2. The ability to tag certain attributes at a client level.  i.e. if a client has a 20h per month retainer with us, a way to ensure that we provide 20h of work, making it easy to see on a weekly basis if we are under or over MTD.
3. The ability to manage ad-hoc tasks and small requests for clients, but also manage large projects for them, ideally at the "Project" level in Jira, but keeping it all under on umbrella, such that when my business unit does our weekly sprint planning we can see all the work in our backlog and in progress including:
   
   1. support work;
   2. ad-hoc requests and single-task projects; and
   3. any large projects associated with our clients that may be setup as separate Projects in Jira.
4. We still need to be able to track our time in Tempo and provide the appropriate reports to accounting so that they can properly invoice for all time by client, regardless of who worked on the tasks, and regardless of whether the work was done for a client in a separate Project, or as part of a larger, general Jira Project.
5. The ability to log time that is not billable for administrative tasks, internal meetings, training, etc.  Such that we can see billable and non-billable time for client work, as well as non-billable internal time spent each day.

 

 

 

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl)

Hi and welcome to the community, @Karl Diethrick 👋

IMHO the reason you haven't had any responses yet may be that your post is a bit like an RFP 😉  It's pretty broad, and pretty deep. On the one hand, the level of detail is great. On the other, it's a bit daunting perhaps for the average community member.

In fact, my first thought was (and is) you probably want to look for an Atlassian Solution Partner to help you with this. Or, maybe a freelance consultant with proven Atlassian SME would be more affordable for a smaller firm like yours. You can probably find tons of them on Up Work (or a similar site).

Lastly, I'd consider networking with your fellow Atlassian experts in your local user group. You can find yours here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

That said, you are off to a good start. Nearly every firm like your that uses Jira adds a time-tracking app to Jira to supplement the rather rudimentary work log capabilities that built into Jira. 

You've already got that in place — and it's the leading one (and from the company I work for).

So, you can reach out to the Tempo support team and ask if they can hook you up with a Tempo solutions (aka customer success) engineer for a *free* chat about your use case.

I hope this helps, Karl.

-dave