Looking for advise with "repeatable" project in Jira

[Yoann Gini]

Hello,

We are a consulting company working for many different customers to help them to reach their goal in term of security, mass management, identity federation, etc.

We are getting more and more works here and it's start to be hard to keep our usual quality of services without modern methods. That's the reasons we took Jira Core, Software and Service Desk in addition to Confluence. Thankfully, we are at the exact size needed to keep all those things free for us (thanks a lot Atlassian for that BTW).

So far, we are already structured in our way of working, we have written SOP for most of the repetitive tasks we do such as:

• opening a new customer account and collect mandatory infos (such as DUNS)
• delivering a MDM project
• delivering an IDP project
• delivering a full cloud Office 365 / Workspace ONE / Okta information system
• etc.

The process we have is quite good and reliable, however, a PDF don't really help to keep the track of what is done and what isn't. Especially when you works on multiple setup during the week.

That's the reason we are looking for a better way to work, especially with the help of Jira.

We already moved our support system to Jira Service Desk and we are happy with that. Now it's time for the next step and I would like advises and feedback on how to configure the solution for such a purpose.

Here is for example an idea of a MDM project tasks:

1. Collect DUNS
2. Open Apple Business Managed account
3. Install or subscribe to the selected MDM
4. Configure the APNS token and set the calendar reminder for renewal
5. Configure the DEP token and set the calendar reminder for renewal
6. Configure the VPP token and set the calendar reminder for renewal
7. Buy all needed apps via VPP
8. Set DEP to automatically assign devices to the MDM
9. Manually assign pre-existing devices
10. Create configuration profile for e-mail service
11. Create configuration profile according to security policy

But all of this obviously have dependencies. Basically:

• 10 and 11 is blocked by 3
• 8 and 9 is blocked by 5
• 7 is blocked by 6
• 4, 5, 6 is blocked by 3 and 2
• 2 is blocked by 1

In term of organization, I would like to keep one Jira Project per customer, to keep things simple in term of info access method. And in those projects, have a way to import standardized patterns for "operations" like those when needed.

What would be your recommendations for that? Did you do something equivalent? Any pitfall you may want to warn me?

A link to a training or a KB is a valid answer too if you think it's in the doc and I've missed it.

Thanks

[Alex Laycy]

Hi Yoann,

To help standardisation, you could setup a template project which you then copy (an option during project setup) whenever you start a new project.

This would then mean all of your projects are using the same issue types etc. The same could then be done with any boards. 

When it then comes to ensuring consistency within the actual issues themselves, a plugin similar to this one may be helpful.

- Alex

[Yoann Gini]

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Multiple project may not be the option for us, it will be way too messy to handle.

Thanks for the pointer to Jira plugin, I didn't thought at this in the first place, I will take a look.

The one you linked, is it something you use? If yes, in which context? What are your personal feedback on it?

[Alex Laycy]

Hi Yoann,

I haven't used that plugin personally - the other approach i've seen taken though is creating very specific issue types, and then enforcing standardisation via issue type screen schemes for each of them.

Tempo have a good blog overview on them here.

When you go down this route you do obviously incur additional setup and admin moving forward, so i'd advise that you consider "bucketing" up your work into a few set types - rather than trying to create issue types for each possible scenario. 

- Alex