JPD implementation across multiple customers

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi,

In a few weeks, I will be implementing JPD for a company that has many (~ tens) customers.

The goal is to ensure that all JPD projects are configured in the same way (one customer = one project). While this is straightforward with company-managed projects, JPD relies on team-managed projects, and I'm concerned whether it is even possible to achieve and keep the configuration consistency.

I understand that I can utilize global custom fields, but that alone doesn't seem sufficient.

Therefore, I'm reaching out to see if anyone has experience with a similar implementation and would be willing to share some insights or tips.

Thank you very much!

[Gary Spross]

Our JPD projects are product (not customer) centric. We have around 20 of them. We came up with "standardizations" to the workflow and utilize Global fields were applicable. We have a set of "standardized" views. We also limited the amount of users that are in the "Administrators" role within each of the projects.

That said, it is painful because, like you said, JPD projects are based on the Team-managed format. This means that any workflow or standardized view changes have to made individually within each project. Also, if we create a new JPD project, we have to manually create the standardized views, configure the standardized workflow, and update the Global fields to include the new project.

I was hoping the Premium version of JPD would address this, but sadly it appears not. I do wish Atlassian provided a way to have JPD projects configured using the Company-managed format. This is a big pain point for companies both big and small.

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Gary Spross ,

thanks a lot for your response. That's what I thought and was worried about.

I'm afraid there won't be any company-managed projects in the near future (if ever) - it is not on the roadmap.

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello @Hana Kučerová 

At the moment, using global fields would be the best way for you to standardize on your Jira Product Discovery projects - so for each new projects, you'd add the same set of of global fields. 

This is just the first step towards more standardization across Jira Product Discovery projects, which as you know are team-managed projects.
We are currently exploringa solution to provide you with the possibility to "clone" projects configuration, so then you won't need to re-create all fields and views every time you'd create a projects - this should streamline your project creation process. 

We are just at the design phase for the moment, but please let me know if you'd like to be part of the beta testers for this feature. 

Next up is to start exploring which functionality of the company managed projects would be most helpful for our customers, and better understand our customer user cases regarding project governance. 

Hope it helps, 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ,

thank you for your response.

"Cloning" projects functionality can definitely help with the creation phase, but I'm more concerned about the maintenance. As @Gary Spross mentioned - we will probably have to limit the list of project admins, because we don't want users to change the configurations. And what's worse - if somebody does this, there's no easy way how to detect these changes and revert them.

I believe there are companies, which prefer to use this team-managed approach, but for a lot of companies this cannot work. I really like JPD and ideas behind it and it would be great, if you provide both approaches (company-managed and team-managed) and let the customers decide, which one to use.

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi Hana, 

Thank you for detailing your use case. As in company managed projects, only Jira admins are allowed to create/add fields etc, what is your concern around doing the same for team-managed projects? 
Instead of putting anyone as a project admin, it would be your Jira admins. What is the downside of this implementation? 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Gary Spross]

@Hermance NDounga, the downside, in our case, is that the Jira admins are Atlassian admins and are supporting all of the Atlassian products we utilize throughout our company, so having them also manage the intricacies of specific project administration that could (in Company-managed projects) be delegated is asking a lot of them. 

Like in Company-managed projects, I would like to have project admins have the ability to:

• Provide the appropriate/necessary project access to users
• Implement project specific automation rules
• Update screen layouts
• Update project details

However, I don't want project admins to have the ability to:

• Change the workflow
  • It would be so helpful to have a way to share a workflow across projects
    • To be able to "share configurations" with another JPD project like we can when creating a Jira or JSM style project would be such a time savings
  • 18 of our 20 projects utilize the same workflow and any changes require going into each project individually and making the change
• Add/Remove fields
  • I'm aware of Global fields and I wish this could have just utilized the normal "custom fields" the way Jira & JSM work instead of being it's own feature in a completely separate section of the settings UI

[Hana Kučerová]

@Gary Spross Thanks for putting this together. I 100% agree.