Optimal Way to Organize Projects, Issues, Components, etc. in JIRA

[Shawn Wallack]

This question seems to have been asked and answered a few times, but none of the answers really solves my teams' specific situation.

Some background info:

We have the following teams:

1. Salesforce Local
2. Salesforce Remote
3. Business Intelligence
4. Web Development
5. IT Operations

We have a custom JIRA project called "Charters" that contains a custom issue type called "Charter" (initiative) which is essentially a request to fund a project with a particular scope and outcome in mind. The charter issue is linked to a Business Case page in Confluence. Each charter advances through a workflow along a Kanban board, essentially from To Do to Approved.

Let's take an example of a charter called "Mosaic." This project will include some work for the Salesforce teams, the BI team, and possibly Web, too.

Once the Mosaic charter is Approved, the work is decomposed into epics and issues. My question is about where those epics and issues should reside.

Right now, we have the following JIRA projects, basically aligned with teams:

1. Salesforce
2. Business Intelligence
3. IT Operations
4. Web Development

Since Mosaic spans multiple teams, it does not naturally fall into one of these buckets. Maybe it makes more sense to have a JIRA project called "Mosaic" instead of having team-centric JIRA projects.

Should JIRA projects be, well, projects? Or should they be team-centric? Or should they be product-centric (i.e., cross-team)?

One of the other major challenges we have is knowing that a particular bunch of epics and issues are actually part of Mosaic. If they are the only issues in the Mosaic JIRA project, then it's easy. But if Mosaic is spread across JIRA Projects, then how do we roll the up? And how to we prioritize the work of one team that may be working on issues in multiple JIRA projects?

Thanks!

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @Shawn Wallack ,

This is an old post so I assume that you've resolved this matter, but just in case, I'll add a comment. The use case you described here, with several teams working on the same project could be managed with scale agile projects and there are tools that help with this on top of Jira, like Big Picture or Jira Align. Have you tried or explored any of these?  For me, it works better when projects are product- or feature- centric, and work in the form of epics or stories/tasks gets created and added to teams' backlogs.