Best practices around segmenting projects in Jira Service Desk

[Dimitar Dimitrov]

Hey community,

Fresh here in Atlassian land. Can someone share what are the best practices around how you should segment projects in Jira Service Desk?

For example - do you have a separate project for Change Management and if so, why? Perhaps it gives you little bit more flexibility but on the other hand are there any future traps when it comes to lest say when I want to view info from multiple projects in one portal?

Also, when it comes to Service Portals - what is the best practice here? Can you have a 'master' portal which can present data from multiple project?

Thanks in advance!

[Meg Holbrook · Accepted solution]

Hey Dimitar, welcome!

I want to address your master portal question first. 

In an organization like mine, we primarily serve internal customers, so a single help portal has worked great. We deploy a series of Issue Types that users can choose from, a few are below: 

- Requests for hardware

- Onboarding new employees

- Technical Help (across 3-4 issues types by product)

That being said, if you are trying to manage multiple products that require their own branding, you may want to branch out to multiple portals. The same goes if your projects aren't going to have a lot in common in terms of workflows, SLAs, permissions, etc. I find it easier to manage multiple help desks on highly varied projects rather than cramming them down one pipe. 

For us, we've structured our change management process in a separate JIRA project because the timelines will be structured quite differently (and I don't want to report or consider a lot of those items in the scope of the help desk break/fix scheme) I find that it's easier to spin off subtasks on project issues rather than managing them through our help desk. 

I hope this helps and that you get some more business use cases from other users!

[Dimitar Dimitrov]

@Meg Holbrookthank you for the reply, it sure does make sense. I am reading these days about setting up portals and how other people have done it, so it surely does seem like your advice is to the point. Happy to be part of the community, I am sure we'll collaborate more along the way.