Should each Jira Project have its own work flow?

Simon Chadwick January 5, 2017

There are two parts to this questions.

  1. Is there any savings in ether compute and/or DB size in having JIRA projects all following the same work flow? We are running JIRA on our own servers and not it the cloud. 
  2. Is it good practice to have all projects/scrum teams following the same work flow (we have multiple teams working on different things)? Or should each team/project setup their own workflow depending on how they work?

I know this 2nd question is a bit open but just trying get an initial understanding of how we should proceed with our setup.

Thanks in advance.

4 answers

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2 votes
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Jonas Andersson
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January 5, 2017

I suggest to reuse as much as possible in Jira. If you can limit the amount of used permissions, workflows, screenschemes and so forth, the easier it gets to understand for the end user. What i suggest is to increase the amount of issuestypes, and use the same workflow for these issuestypes across all projects. This makes it easier to create JQL filters that are looking for specific statuses.

A good example might be a procurement process, where individual departments has their own project, which all contain a procurement ticket issues type. A part of this ticket can be price, description, business case. With this setup you can now create JQL filters that allows you to line up all procurements still open, the price of these. By a simple change in what projects you are searching for issues, you can now see the global outstanding procurements, or cherry-pick what all development projects outstanding procurement costs are.

The same could be applied to change management, allowing you to line up upcoming changes, within a department, within a datacenter, within the whole organization.

I base this on 10 years of experience of administering Jira.

 

1 vote
Volodymyr Krupach
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January 5, 2017

> Is there any savings...
I would not worry about it unless you have millions of projects.

> Is it good practice to have all projects/scrum teams following the same work flow 
It's good a approach if you have a requirement that all your projects (or set of projects) should have the same flow and any workflow change should be reflected in all of them. From other side it's better to have separate workflows if you want to have flexibility of changing workflow for a single project without touching all others.

 

0 votes
Simon Chadwick January 5, 2017

Thank you Jonas, Nic and Volodymyr for great responses with examples. Very much appreciated. 

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 5, 2017

I started typing, but Volodymyr and Jonas have covered almost everything I wanted to say.

There is one additional point I'd make though - normal users can edit workflows to a limited extent. 

  1. JIRA Agile introduced "simplified workflows" which allow a board owner to set a workflow for that board.  A board can span projects, so they would all have the same workflow, and the editing is limited to making the workflow a simple pile of unordered status, it's not a process flow at all.  Simple columns define it, and there's no post-functions, conditions etc.  JIRA Software has continued with that.
  2. JIRA 7.3 allows project administrators some editing of workflows.  It's a bit more limited in some ways (they can't add status, only reuse existing ones for example), but does include the ability to maintain transitions, so a process can be mapped.  It can only be done on projects that have their own workflow - not a shared one.

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