How to Auto-Configure All Boards to be the Same

Question

Hello,

Our company will be implementing Jira for our Project Management soon, me being the main admin.

I'll be adding each functional area as its own project (example: Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, etc.) and I'm running across an issue that I'm hoping there's an answer for. I keep needing to manually configure each project with the fields I want. What I would like is:

* To have a main configuration so that if we add projects, the fields I want are there and I don't have to manually configure each one
* This will also prevent users from adding child issues that are not configured with the right fields. Is there a way to configure child issues as well to have the fields I choose/personalized?

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Heather Barnes and welcome to the Community!

As a first step, set up a first project and make sure you make it company managed. Configure all the settings the way you want your "standard project" to be. That means:

* Configuring the desired issue types
* Setting up screens with the necessary fields 
* Designing your workflows

Once you've done that, every time you create a new project, make sure to check the box share settings with an existing project in the very last step:

That will ensure your projects share the same settings, as you describe.

Two additional things:

* when you create a project like this, your new project will be created without a board. So you will need to add a board afterwards, which is not very difficult to do and does not take a lot of time. Once in your new project, from the Boards menu select Create Board and follow the steps (choose scrum or kanban > from existing project > select your project).
* After you add a board to your project, go to board settings > columns and make sure all there is a column on the board for every status in your project issues' workflow(s). That is to make sure all issues appear on the board, whatever status they are in.

Finally, while it may seem like a good idea to share the same settings across all projects, for your users this may not be true all the time. Tasks for compensation may e.g. need entirely different information than work related to Employee Relations. And so I would recommend to ensure that you don't put fields on screens that users do not need to fill out. While this may require more configuration from you as an administrator, it will make Jira a far more easier tool to use for the people on the job.

Hope this helps!

Tinker Fadoua · Answer

@Heather Barnes

Good morning and welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You can create blank projects with the configuration you want, call them like Project "name of your choice" template and whenever you create a new project choose the template you like.

Don't let users create any issues on the template projects so you can update them any time you want without having to worry or get a configuration error.

Best,

Fadoua