How to manage customers inside issue (task)?

Question

Hi!

What would be the right way to manage such work in Jira that needs to be done for several customers? For example, a report needs to be set to 100 customers and progress needs to be monitored per customer.

Do the customers have to be exported separately as subtasks inside issue? And how can we export several of these at a time?

Can subtasks be displayed on the Kanban board separately if we divide these among several assignee?

Thank You.

Walter Buggenhout · Accepted Answer

Hi @Sanna Mäntynenä and welcome to the Community!

There is nothing that you must do in Jira, honestly. Jira is meant to support the way you manage work inside your team and not dictate how your teams should bend the way they work to align with the tool.

Having said that, start with a clear understanding of what you need to get this work done. Assuming this is a real request, how does it get to your team? Are these 100 customers all asking you to build this report (in that case, you probably have an idea portal where you collect ideas in the first place with lots of separate requests that need to be consolidated). Do you decide yourself that you are going to build a new report and then pick a set of customers to distribute it to? How do your customers access the report and how is this new report distributed to their environment(s)? Is the deployment of this new report automated or does it need to be deployed manually to each environment? ...

Answering all or some of these questions will give you insight in:

* the overall flow of a request from idea to delivery;
* who is involved in getting all this work done;
* how these teams / people are organized in Jira
* what you need to create in order to succesfully deliver everything and where

If we assume that building this report and distributing it to all customers involves a lot of manual work, I would dare to consider this almost like a project. In that case I would dare to create an Epic as an umbrella for the new report, adding tasks to:

* build the report
* separate tasks for each deployment (you can still decide to create one task per assignee or a task per customer, depending on the complexity of this deployment and the way you work

If you are on the other end of the spectrum and the deployment is heavily automated, you may just restrict the instructions in Jira to a task for building the report that includes the deployment as part of the issue type's workflow.

Most likely, you may end up somewhere in between those scenario's.

Hope this helps!