Jira Service Management for multiple clients (with multiple projects for each client)

[Vasco Patarata]

Hi, Jira community,

Before anything, I am new to Jira, only use it as a customer in the IT support of my company.

We are starting to use Jira Service Management to implement a Client Service Desk in my company.

Starting on the considerations of our reality:

• We do projects on multiple clients (30+ and growing) - usually, we come back and do more projects with the same client.
• Our projects often end with deploying customized and specialized tools on the client-side (web applications, for instance).
• We then need to provide customer support to those tools, so we have lots of different support streams and a growing trend for the future.
• We currently perform support via ad-hoc communication with our clients.
• We do not have a specialized support team, each support stream can have its specific allocated team.

Based on these considerations we decided that it was time to implement a more structured and centralized support management system and we decided to try Jira Service Management as it was already being used internally.

To start with our implementation we opted to instantiate clients as Jira Service Management projects (using the Components feature to split our different projects with the same client inside the JSM project).

Our main question is how to manage all of these projects for different clients with a certain degree of standardization and centralized structure, but still allow customization for that specific client needs. Did you ever face this use case? How do you recommend handling it?

Our current view on this subject consists of the following points:

• We are creating a Jira Service Management Template with the main structure for support already built. Our idea was to replicate this structure as new clients with support needs arise.
• We know that new JSM projects can be created replicating the Template configuration. However, this option makes all the screens, issues, and workflow schemes shared across JSM projects. This implies that a change in a scheme would affect all the JSM projects, so we lose the possibility of customization inside each client.
• The other option is to create a different scheme for each client. However, in this case, we lose the possibility of making changes at the centralized level, to affect all the client's JSM projects, having to replicate the changes in each different scheme.

Is there a way of having a hybrid approach, with a centralized structure but project-specific customizations? Having full customization without any centralization will be a nightmare for managing when the number of clients grows and we need to make global changes to the structure of our support projects.

Thank you very much in advance for your help and hope to understand better what is the Jira way of handling this use case.

Best regards,

Vasco

[Andrea Novelo]

We have exactly the same issue. It's a nightmare and im looking for integration options. Most of  the solutions I have find are mainly for several Proyects but only across a specific client. 

I will let you know if I find something useful. 

Thank you. 

[Tom Rogers]

We use a single instance of Jira Cloud and set up each client as a project, then using components we can create a board for each sub project for that client. For example, we may work with Client X (Project) and run a website (component) and social media campaign (component). Then we setup two boards, one for website and one for social media. In the JQL filter we can then filter all the tickets by component. This displays them in the relevant kanban board under the client (project). This way you can view all tickets for a client and filter by sub project. Prety sure this isn't the best way to do this, but works for us. Hopefully that helps. 

You can also Clone tickets if you need templates of content to reuse and then move it into other projects.