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How to manage multiple projects in a single board under new JIRA design

Alex Blanton

So, before the JIRA Cloud redesign, we were planning on migrating all of our TFS online projects into JIRA as separate projects, and then group them into boards based on team assignments.

Since we one team support multiple sites in a portfolio it is much easier for us to have sites as their own projects and have them work off of a single sprint backlog board. However, I don't see how to do this anymore. Boards appear to be tied to a specific project.

How would we have a sprint team support multiple sites in a single sprint board?

Accepted answers

Peter DeWitt

@Alex Blanton, you can click the Boards button and then view all boards. From that screen you can click the create board button. This will create you a new board. Like before you will be able to start with a project or filter. Either is fine as they can be changed afterward.

Eventually, you will need a filter that pulls in all project issues. into your board. You can then segment the projects by swimlane or quick filter.

As far as the board being 'assigned' to a project, it will link to each project represented in the shared board. You will need to pick one to run the sprint out of though.

.pd

All comments

Peter DeWitt

Eventually, you will need a filter that pulls in all project issues. into your board. You can then segment the projects by swimlane or quick filter.

As far as the board being 'assigned' to a project, it will link to each project represented in the shared board. You will need to pick one to run the sprint out of though.

.pd

Alex Blanton

Thanks - that is what I was trying to figure out. It's a bit odd however to have to run the sprint out of one particular project, but maybe I can create a project to hold the sprint for each team.

Lisa de Araujo

Where is the Boards button? I can't seem to find that anywhere.

Joshua Balsillie

@Lisa de Araujo

Depends which version of Jira you are using.

If you see your profile image bottom left, click the magnifying glass (search) > under "Recent Boards" > "View all boards". Took me a bit to find this as well.

If you see your profile image top right, "Boards" appears as a drop-down in the top navigation bar.

unknown

Does anyone know if using the custom filters to create a single view that pulls in all projects can be extended to boards under a client account?

For context, we provide support for a platform to a few different clients. Most of them use our JiRA boards to submit tickets, requests, etc, but there a couple who have their own JiRA accounts. We are trying to merge the data from both sources so we have a more accurate vision of inflight work for better resource planning and management.

Any ideas?

Alex Blanton

In order for you to display issues from one JIRA account within another JIRA account you will need a plug-in. Something like this would be an example: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1213346/issue-sync-synchronization-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

Alex Blanton

Another option may be to use a 3rd party tool to pull both instances and their issues and setup a roadmap dashboard:

https://www.smartsheet.com/s/smartsheet-and-jira?s=1&c=6&m=152&a=210624263266&k=%2Bjira&mtp=b&adp=1t2&net=g&dev=c&devm=&plc=&gclid=CjwKCAjw9qfZBRA5EiwAiq0AbZSoURFWFsub-wNMbCIRMvFu2KhVmzFAbFy2Zo6DWr8cF-Dl61ywYhoC70oQAvD_BwE

Peter DeWitt

@[deleted], you could also look at using Federation:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/federating-jira-managing-multiple-instances-961257360.html

Joao Pedro Portela

@Blake Dodley That was my idea as well... till I noticed you can't create Epic on Epics, nor add tasks on stories, just subtasks. Subtasks don't show up in your board, so you just have a messy board with unusable stuff.

Example:

Let's say you use your project as your team and your epic as your project. Let's say you have a "Migration to Cloud" project (which would be an epic in this case).

An epic inside this "project" could be "Deploy service X", but since "Migration to Cloud" is already an epic and for some unreasonable reason you can't create epics inside epics, you need to create "Deploy service X" as a story/task. Then, let's say you want to create a "Create terraform templates" as part of this, and "instance", "roles", "security group" inside it. Like this:

Migration to Cloud > Deploy service X > Create terraform templates > Create instance

Migration to Cloud > Deploy service X > Create terraform templates > Create access roles

Migration to Cloud > Deploy service X > Create terraform templates > Create security group

You simply can't, without losing track of what you are doing. Yes, "Migration to Cloud" would be your epic and "Deploy service X" would be your story/task. Since you can't add tasks to a story/task, just subtasks (and they don't show up in your board), your board will have just "Deploy service X", instead of "create terraform templates". That means EVERYTHING needs to be done before moving, which makes no sense at all.

The idea of locking what can be inside what is completely random and against agile methodology itself. Agile is not about following frameworks, is about adapting them to your team to get the best out of it. This restriction just makes people asking WHY in a LOT of these tickets (I can copy links for questions like these or "epic under epic" for an entire day).

As you can see on the screenshot below, "Deploy service X" is still under "TODO", but "Create terraform templates" is already "in progress", and you can't see that in "In Progress" (and not even commenting the fact that you CAN'T create subtasks for the subtasks, so you even lose that information).

The fact that you need to pay for plugins (like Portfolio or Structure) to work as a workaround (like the workaround suggested in this post) just shows that the platform is simply not ready for teams with multiple projects.

If you decide to use one board per project, you will have dozens of boards (which is basically not possible to track at all) or you have to use this suggested "hack", but you completely lose the control over your tasks.

The fact that GitHub+ZenHub or GitLab have this and it's not even their main purpose (ok, it is for ZenHub) is quite concerning.

I'll keep trying to find a solution for this during my trial period, but it seems to be a complete dealbreaker.

If you guys have any ideas how to solve this WITHOUT paying more just to get on a workaround to "fix" the platform I would love to know.

Cheers.

JConners_hkpq38

It's a mess

zhanwenchen

The way I did it was to create a new board called "All." In "Board Settings" > "General" under "All," I edited the filter query from "project = All ORDER BY Rank ASC" to "project in (BEAM-NN, LiederNet, Life, "PhD Applications", ToM-AMT) ORDER BY Rank ASC", where "(BEAM-NN, LiederNet, Life, "PhD Applications", ToM-AMT)" are my projects aliases. I'm not suer if there's a wildcard alternative for when I add/remove a project, but this works for now.

Birgit_r4xazi

Hi, from the discussion "how to manage multiple projects from a single board" it is still not clear to me how you run multiple projects and teams from one Board?

I came across this discussion, looking how Jira needs to be structured to be able to run different projects from a single product backlog with different Boards and Teams. Is that possible to do and still get all the basic metrics? Thank you for your feedback!

Mahmoud Youssef_cgwpoy

Hi Birgit,

One issue to clarify first is that if you are using the Next Generation project type, you will not be able to have multiple projects in the same board since this type of projects is not designed for that.

If you are using classic projects, then you can create a board that have multiple projects by creating a board for one project then editing the JQL that defines the board filter to add other projects.

In regards to seeing to multiple teams in the same board, that will depend on how you are modeling your teams. Many of us model the the team as a Jira project and actual project as an Epic. This makes a lot of sense for small teams in particular. However, if you modeled your teams as Jira teams and projects as Jira projects, then with proper permissions you can create a board across projects from multiple teams by changing the board filter (editing the JQL that defines the filter).

I hope this helps

Mahmoud

Birgit_r4xazi

Thank you very much for your response Mahmoud, it is much appreciated!

Amy Taylor

Hi all,

I've read through the entire thread and am still not seeing a clear solution to what I'm trying to acheive. Apologies if this is redundant but if someone could let me know what I'm doing wrong or how else I can approach this to achieve my end goal of being able to control multiple projects from a single source that would be much appreciated.

I've created single board with a JQL query pulling from three different projects. I wasn't aware that boards had to be tied to a specific project now but I set it up within one of these three projects. What I'd like to do and how I thought this would work is that I'd have a single backlog from all three projects that I could then plan into a single sprint. My goal is to have one place where my team members can see their weekly assignments across all projets as well as having a single place for the PM to conduct weekly planning and make adjustments. Reality is although I can create new sprints within this new master board I can only add tickets tied to the project it's located in. This means the PM still needs to go into each individual project and set up a sprint with the relevant tasks. Also means a team member would have to go into each project to pull in work if they are ahead for the week. It's totally counter intuative and pointless.

Did I do something wrong with the setup of the master board or can anything be changed in the config to allow me to cotrol other projects from that one board? Any other suggestions? Thanks.

Jimmy Seddon

Hi @Amy Taylor,

Just to be sure based on @Mahmoud Youssef's comment above, are any of the three projects you are trying to manage a "Next-Gen" project? You can find this out by going to going to projects in the left hand menu and clicking on any of the projects in question. Again in the left hand menu bar for the project, at the bottom of the page it will tell you if you are in a next-gen project or not.

If you are using classic projects this should work and the next thing I would be looking at would be your permission schemes to make sure that the people who are trying to add items to the sprints have permissions in all three projects as that could affect their ability to add items into the sprint.

I hope that helps!

christian_haenlein

Hi all,

I tried to create a new board accessing multiple existing projects. Seems that it still works like @Alex Blanton described back then. But, my latest project is in NextGen style and it does not appear in the board selection field. Only the ones of the classic style projects. Further, in the board overview, there is no way to change the settings of the NextGen board.

Would be very happy to discuss any solution or workaround.

Thanks in advance

Ray Mangan

So it seems that if you have all of your projects in Jira Cloud, next-gen projects, there is no way to pull all of your issues from together into a single board. Is that correct?

Mark Crocker

There is, if you turn on releases setting in next gen you can pull these into a software board, but im struggling with the ranking now, so you can see everything in a board but you can't manipulate the ranking of nextgen items because they don't use epic links like classic projects.

Anna_w4ppip

I wonder if Jira developers frequent message boards like this? It seems to be a widespread issue with having the same teams managing multiple projects yet there is no easy way to add any of that to a single sprint. I hope Jira developers will be able to create a simpler solution for all interested in it.

Petter Gonçalves

Hello Everyone,

Several teams have interacted In this thread for the past few years, so here is an updated answer for everyone interested in this matter:

Today, Jira Software Cloud offers two kinds of projects: Classic (Same used by Jira Server) and Next-gen (Only available in Cloud). Although both project types are automatically added with a related board when created, the behavior of these project types and customization options are straight different regarding the sharing of the board between multiple projects, as mentioned in the documentation below:

What is a Jira Software board?

Classic boards are not tied to a project, but to a JQL filter that can be found under the Board settings. That being said, you can edit that board filter to include issues from all the projects you want, sharing the same board between multiple projects. Additionally, you can create a new classic board either from a project or an existing filter, selecting where you want it to be allocated.

For more details on how to configure your Classic board to return multiple projects, you can check the documentation below:

Configure Filters

Now, Next-gen boards can only be created by creating a new Next-gen project and are strictly related to the project it was created, although we have a feature request to allow the editing of the board filters in Next-gen. For now, Next-gen boards can not be customized to return issues from any other projects except for the one where they were created.

For more details about Next-gen projects and boards, you can check the documentation below:

Working with next-gen software projects | Jira Software Cloud | Atlassian Documentation

Thanks!

Filip Lewandowski

Hi, does anyone know how to show only one type of tasks from other project on a board for different project. My case is: We have board for a project but we also do some stuff for other project but these are only bugs so I want to show only bugs from project B on a board for project A and I dont what to create board for both project and using filtres.

Frans Jacobs_nlw2j0

I'm trying out the latest version of Jira Cloud and googled this question before trying, but it seems it's possible to create a board that incorporates several projects.

I googled and came upon this current thread and thought it wasn't possible, so for anyone that does the same, here's proof:

Andrey Dumnaziev

This is a common challenge — managing issues from multiple projects on a single board.

If you're looking for a dedicated solution, we recently built OneBoard for Jira - a Forge app that creates unified cross-project boards with:

Custom columns with status mapping across different project workflows
Drag-and-drop that triggers real Jira transitions
Filters by project, type, priority, assignee, label, and sprint across all projects
Works with Scrum, Kanban, and team-managed projects

It's free for teams up to 10 users: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1113497994/

Hope this helps!

Kh_Safal

Hi @Andrey Dumnaziev, we noticed you posted promotional content in multiple places across the forums, which is against our Atlassian Partners - Rules of Engagement. I’ve removed the duplicate/promotional posts.

Please take a moment to review our rules so you're aware for next time. Also, if you're part of a Marketplace App team, we’d like to ask you to follow the steps outlined here to get an “Atlassian Partner” lozenge for your profile.

this topic has been locked because the thread has become a bit dated. You can read more about necro posting (“raising threads from the dead”) in our Community Guidelines.

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