What are your main reasons for creating multiple JSD projects?

[Markus Raab]

I am setting up JIRA Service Desk to replace our ageing Kayako support portal. Looking at the opportunities I have a key question comes into my mind: How many JSD projects do I need and what are the reasons for creating an own JSD project?

It seems to me that I could handle all issues in one single project as well. So what are the main reasons to split it up?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The main reasons I see are different fields of support.

I'll give you a simplified example:  A client I had a while ago had five portals, for two reasons. 

They had three main products that they needed to support, vaguely related to each other, but to clients, they were separate, and internally, each one was supported by a different team of developers (there was a lot of overlap, with many developers being in two or all three teams, but they could always point at the product and say "working on that one").

They then had a fourth portal for the IT support team (I need a new laptop, password reset, vpn etc) and a fifth portal for building maintenance (new desk, chair, lighting issue, etc).

So, broadly, look at the teams doing the work and how the customers will see the portals.  If all the support calls are going to be for one set of things all looked after by the same people, then a single portal makes total sense.  If you have clearly divided teams and/or products, think about having more than one, so that customers are not dazzled with an array of irrelevant request types.

[Markus Raab]

Thanks Nic!

We went over your message a couple of times and will do some test setup the next days. If I have some interesting (different) findings I'll post them here as well.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Excellent.  This is very much a case of fitting the software to best fit your needs, not a "there's one way to do everything with JSD".  The community is always interested in case studies and examples of where people have managed to make it work really well, and clever tricks played (and the odd precautionary horror story too!)