Advise needed on Project Setup and Usage

unknown

Hi, I'm currently reviewing Jira to replace our in-house issue and project task tracking system. With our current system we break down 'general' issues into 15 areas, usually business area, and have a unique code for each. For example 001 - General Support, 002 - Business Area 1, 003 - Business Area 2 etc. Moving onto Jira I was wondering if anyone would recommend having 1 project per business area or having 1 project with a component/category for each business area? I like the idea of the latter as it just seems simpler, but I didn't know if this would cause any performance problems as most of the issues/requests etc (~ 2k/year) would be under 1 project. Actual projects, i.e. none support related work, will have their own project and set of tasks etc. Thanks in advance, Mj

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I would lean towards the second for your case here, but I'd look at the human side and think about reporting as well.

First, components are editable by the project admins, so, if you make use of versions or delegate the user maintenance to project admins, you might find they go adding/editing/deleting components

Second, components are multi-select. You can therefore say "issue belings to General, Business area 4 and business area 7". That might not be valid for you

Both of those are simple to fix - use a custom field instead. You can have a single-select, or multi-select, as appropriate, and only Jira system admins can maintain the list of options.

For the human and reporting side, think about how you'd like your people to work. If each business area has a team of people who rarely work in other areas, then I'd be strongly tempted to have a project per business area. But if it's more about tracking "who wants it" or "where it came from", and your workers are all working together and don't really care that much about business area, then you'll find a single project far more easy to handle. The business area field remains useful for reporting, but the workers might not be bothered about it.

For what it's worth, there's a project here with over 90,000 issues, generated over 5 years. The only problem we've got with volume is slightly slow searches sometimes, and the "closed" statistics makes everything else look silly because it's always 99.99%...