We are enabling team-managed projects for Jira Service Management

[#1]

To our friends on Community!

We wanted to let you know that we will be rolling out team-managed projects for Jira Service Management (Cloud) over the coming months.

Do you want to get access right now? You can turn them on (and off) in product settings.

So, what are team managed projects? Team-managed projects are great for teams who want to get started quickly and create their own service project without impacting settings or shared configurations across the organisation. Because of this, team-managed projects can be ideal for business teams who want to set up their own service desks based on their own ways of working without any assistance from a Jira or site admin.

By enabling team-managed projects, you are unlocking a whole new simplified project creation experience that is opened up to project admins.

Team-managed service desks have come a long way in the past few years and are only getting better. Let’s walk through some of the key features that make them game changers for teams that are looking to build their own service desks.

Create custom fields in your service desk project

Project admins can create their own custom fields with ease in team-managed projects. Simply select the field type and create it in the request type. The field can then be reused in other request types but not shared in other Jira projects. These custom fields will appear in JQL and the global issue navigator, meaning that you can report on these fields, but they won’t appear in your global configuration, meaning that the fields are scoped to the single project.

But what about global custom fields from company-managed projects? We understand that some users prefer to use existing custom fields where possible and are excited to announce that this will soon be possible. In the coming months, not only be able to create your own independent custom fields that don’t impact global settings, but also access company-managed fields in team-managed projects. We are pushing to enable this by the end of March 2023 and will keep you posted.

Customisable workflows

Any project admin can modify workflows in a team-managed project. The team-managed project workflow editor lets you modify workflows within the project, adding statuses and transitions as you see fit.

While team-managed projects don’t have all the robust features available in company-managed projects, we do have a wide range of workflow rules that enable post-function, validator and conditions functionality.

In the past, we’ve heard complaints about how team-managed projects don’t let you copy or share workflows across request types. This is no longer an issue: you can copy a workflow across other request types in the same service desk project so you can make the change once and push it to other request types as needed.

Project-scoped roles and permissions

Team-managed projects allow you to create project-scoped roles that are directly tied to project permissions. Simply create new or copy existing roles to get started.

You can then decide what permissions these people get. You can select granular permissions or use the hierarchy to save time and toggle on multiple permissions at once.

What about other features?

You can use use forms, automation, language support and other features in team-managed projects in Jira Service Management.

It’s important to mention, however, that ITSM features (incident management, change management etc.) do not work in team-managed projects, which is why we recommend it for non-IT teams first and foremost.

How to enable team-managed projects for Jira Service Management on your instance

You can enable (and disable) team-managed projects for Jira Service Management in the “Products” settings page.

You can navigate there by clicking on ⚙️ > Products and then selecting “Configuration” on the left-hand navigation.

Are you using team-managed projects? We want to talk to you!

We are looking to improve team-managed projects so they better meet your needs. We’d love to hear from you if you are using them so we can better understand how we can support you and your team. Please click on this link to book a conversation with the product team.

Do you have any other thoughts you’d like to share about team-managed projects for Jira Service Management? Please comment on this article, we’d love to hear from you.

Best regards,

Jehan Gonsalkorale,

Product Manager, Jira Service Management

[Sam Nadarajan]

Nice! I'm looking forward to hearing more about the future of team-managed projects and feature parity with company-managed projects as well!

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Sam Nadarajan!

Great to hear from you! I'd love to have a chat with you about this to better understand how team-managed projects could better suit your needs. 

Could you click on this link and book a meeting with me? https://calendly.com/jgonsalkorale/team-managed-projects-research

If you are struggling to find a good time, just email me at jgonsalkorale@atlassian.com. 

I'd love to get your perspective on team-managed service desk projects!

Best regards,

Jehan

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Jehan Gonsalkorale 

Although I like the well-written article, honestly, I'm not a fan of team-managed projects and would rarely recommend using these.

The reason is that at some point in time, either the administrator or management wants to consolidate reporting on both company-managed and team-managed projects. Or custom fields need to be shared.

Also, if you should decide to migrate from one to the other, you cannot re-use the project key.

Maybe I'm biased as a Jira Admin who likes to standardise and use schemes and shared objects as much as possible. But still, team-managed projects are confusing to me and lead to limitations in the end.

For me personally, governance is key and that cannot be achieved with team-managed projects, whether in JSW of JSM.

[Fernando Eugênio da Silva]

Hi @Jehan Gonsalkorale !

Great news!

Something that wasn't explicitly clear to me. Will team-managed projects be able to use Assets resources?

What does this "External Asset Platform" field resource mean? How does it work for team-managed projects?

Where does your base come from, for example?

Thank you!

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Dave Mathijs

Thanks for your comment, I totally understand. We are very aware that many of our customers should not be using team-managed projects given their needs. Particularly those that don't want project admins creating their own fields and workflows and want fields and workflows to be shared across projects. Our approach is for the two project types to provide options so that users can decide what they need. 

We will be enabling team-managed projects for Jira Service Management this financial year but you can turn these off by:

1. Disabling team-managed projects for Jira Service Management in "Product Settings"
2. Disabling team-managed projects for all Jira products by disabling create permissions in "Global Settings"

We are, however, working to make team-managed projects better suit your needs. While company-managed projects are best for those that wish to share schemes across projects, we are looking to enable some level of sharing in team-managed projects and are looking at enabling migration from team-managed projects to company-managed projects. 

In terms of sharing, we will enable global custom fields in the next few months so you can use fields from company-managed projects (but team-managed project fields would still be confined to the project they were created in). 

What other features would you need to see before team-managed projects would meet your needs? We are looking to understand which features we'd need to enable to make team-managed projects more suitable to more teams while still letting it be a place where project admins can configure things without impacting other projects. 

Would love to hear your thoughts. :) 

Best regards,

Jehan

[Justin King]

Hi @Fernando Eugênio da Silva 

Yes you will be able to add global JSM Assets objects fields into your team-managed projects! This is rolling out now in Jira Software team-managed projects and will be coming to Jira Service Management shortly. Reach out to me at jking@atlassian.com if you would be interested in joining the EAP.

The "External asset platform" field you see there is actually not related to JSM Assets. This is a type of custom field that has been in Jira for some time and was previously just called an "Assets". We recently renamed it "External asset platform" to try and avoid confusion with the newer JSM Assets objects field. This purpose of this field is to allow selecting assets which can be made available by Atlassian Marketplace apps. If you are seeing it then I suspect your site has one or more of those apps installed. 

Hope that helps!

Justin

[Austin Songer]

I know this may be something you won't do.

There are some teams that really love working off of "Boards." Adding the ability to add a board to a "Team-Managed" Service Desk project would be awesome.

Now of course I don't want boards available on "Company-Managed"

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Austin Songer , thanks for flagging this. We have teams looking into enabling boards on both team-managed and company-managed service projects. The timeline on this is long as there is some work required and we are at an early stage (just to manage your expectations) but we are actively discussing this and hope to make it happen in the next 12 months or so. 

I hope that's helpful!

Best regards,

Jehan