Customer Deployment Projects

Question

We actually use Jira to manage three Agile projetcs in our company. Each project is a “product” that our commercial team sells to our customers.

When a customer buys one or some of our products, the deployment team starts a project (that isn’t actually managed by Jira) that will have phases like “preparing customer environment”, “software deployment”, “customer training”, “certification”, and so on. Sometimes, during the “software deployment” phase, we detect that some “customizations” needs to be developed by our dev team. Then, a new backlog task is created on the respective Jira project and our dev team starts to work on it sometime in the near future.

I’m trying to realize how could I use Jira to track these “Deployment Projects” in a way that I can always see how each customer project is moving and also which tasks each project generated to our development team.

Should I create one project to each deal that is done by our commercial team and create tasks that represents each phase of that project? In case of customizations, how could I create additional tasks that will be handled by our development team (these tasks should be created on the projects that represents the software in which that customization is required) while keeping the deployment team updated about that task (if it is in progress, in review, finished and so on).

Please let me know if this could be accomplished and your advices on how it could be done. If there is any additional software and/or plugins involved please let me know also. Thanks a lot!!!

Markos Stefanou_r3mk0u · Answer

There are a number of approaches.

Depending on the amount of work that you may receive from a customer you may to choose to have a project per customer, or an issue type per customer.

Let's see the cases:

A company has one project for each of its clients. Why?

-The company is B2B working extensively on different requests. For example, if the company produces code for a customer the company may choose to have one project containing different factors on those requests. An issue type could be "Request" another would be "Bug Report" and a third one could be "Quality Assurance"

A company has one project per department. Why?

-The company provides different services to customers. When a client makes a request, it is forwarded in an issue relative to the department. This way, let's say that a client requests "Adjustments in its login screen", the request would go to the company's website developers project, then the client also requests "New logo background" which would be forwarded to the company's graphic designers' project.

A company uses a mix of two. Why?

-Most commonly this is a result of requiring projects for its internal usage (Legal team, Management team, etcetera) while also having close interdependence with outsourced teams. Each outsourced team has its own project.

"What are my Information Security requirements"?

I'm mentioning this to highlight the fact that each project has one and only one permission scheme. Issue security levels are a way to be flexible but they are not as flexible as one would expect. You should also take this into consideration.

As far as your last question is concerned, even though I feel like I'm lacking info, after you have everything in JIRA and not spread between different systems, you could use issue linking. By linking issues you may connect a client's requirement that lie in one project with the contract that they have signed which is part of an issue in your Legal project. You could potentially use post functions in your workflows that send information from one project to another, or create issues that allow you to keep everything updated.

Régis Oliveira · Answer

Hello  Markos!

We are evaluating leaving the current software and migrating everything to Jira.

Is a best practice create “one project” for each customer?

Also, what are the advices to create a task into the devs team project from the “customer project” keeping they synchronized?

Markos Stefanou_r3mk0u · Answer

The easiest solution is having someone summarize the activities in an issue's comment segment in Jira and create links etc.

Another solution would be to setup mail handlers and listeners in your Jira project that grab the activities that take place in the mentioned project. I am not sure what kind of software you are using to manage the projects that you mention that "isn't actually managed by Jira" but I assume it would allow some types of notification emails that Jira can grab with an email handler addon and update/create issues.

The hard but permanent solution is the development of an API that communicates between the two systems. It requires developers to take care of something like that.