What is the best way to merge multiple JPD projects into one?

[Omer Meshar]

We decided we want to get all the product managers into a single JPD project (we currently have a project per main product).

What is the best way to go ahead and do this? By moving the ideas from the current projects to the new merged one? By exporting and importing the ideas?

Any other way to do it?

[Hermance NDounga]

Hi Omer, 

The two ways you describes are indeed the only ways, and I would say that they can either be suitable according to your use case, but none is perfect cause they have limitations. 

• Moving ideas: The "Move" feature does not retain the values for team managed projects. As Jira Product Discovery projects are all team-managed projects, your ideas will arrive in the new project without values, besides description, assignee, created date and reporter. However with this method you will keep the Insights, and delivery tickets 
• The export/import is keeping the values, but the ideas are all newly created (so you cannot really know what are the old ones and what are the new ones) and the insights aren't kept. 

So basically, if at the moment, you have a lot of insights and delivery tickets linked, and you don't want to loose them, I would recommand to use the "Move" function - especially if the values/fields of the old project do not really match the new project and will need to be reassessed. 

If you barely have no insights/delivery tickets, then export/import is quicker. 

I would personally do an hybrid version of it, where you export your old project, so you have the values easily accessible, then you Move the ideas to the new project, so they don't loose their insights and metadata, and then I would refer to the exported file to manually update the values in the custom fields - but that would surely take more time. 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery

[Omer Meshar]

Thanks Hermance.

Is there any plan to make this less painful?

[Omer Meshar]

Oh, and would moving the ideas and importing them, and then merging them would work?

[Hermance NDounga]

We will be exploring better solution to move ideas in the future, yes. 

Oh! The merging solution would indeed be an awesome alternative to my "hybrid" idea. So you'd select the imported issue, merge it with the moved issue and keep the values and desc from the imported one. And the insights and delivery items of the moved ones will appear under the imported one!

I downside I see is that until you finish this process, you'll have all ideas in double, so you need to make sure people don't change the one that later will be archived.

I also think that it will be tedious to find the two corresponding ideas, you'd need to create a new view that contains only the imported and moved ideas (not too sure based on which metadata you could filter the other ones from that view) and sort this view by summary (alphabetical order) so the corresponding one is directly below (so you can see its issue key to make sure the target idea is the right one) .

[Omer Meshar]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ,

Thanks for your help. I am trying to do this, and it seems to work (!) - tried it on a single idea so far.

However, one thing that I saw was that the original idea which I moved, still existed in its original project for a while. So I had 3 ideas (original one, imported one that was archived after merge and the moved one). This was solved a few minutes later, and the original one disappeared...

Is that the right behaviour?

[Hermance NDounga]

Hey Omer, 

It's great to hear this solution could be a good workaround! 

The behavior you describe seems faulty, but moving ideas between projects is a "platform" feature, so regarding this one, you can definitely open a support ticket, so our Support Engineers can eventually investigate your instance to see why you get this "latency". 

[Omer Meshar]

Hi @Hermance NDounga ,

Just to update that I completed a successful migration between one project to another, following the suggested workaround, and it seems to have done the job. It does take some time and concentration, but it is doable.

Thanks for your help.

Omer