How do I get a dropdown with a Board that shows all my Projects?

[james_oleary]

Hi all, 

I would preface this with it is possible that I just have the wrong JIRA product, but I am new, so please forgive me if that's the case! 

We have been trying to structure our JIRA such that we can see a board with all issues across all projects. I have tried setting up a new Kanban project board in a Company Managed Project with a JQL filter

Project in (Project1, Project2)

but this filter does not pull in the issues from the other projects. 

Is it possible to set up a board this way? Our version of JIRA does not have a dropdown called "Boards," only one for "Projects" so this could certainly be the issue. 

Thanks in advance! 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @james_oleary 

Welcome to the community.

Yes, you can do this.

To manually create a board you can click in the Quick Search field in the upper right. When you click there you'll get a pop-up and at the bottom of that pop-up is a Boards button. Click that.

The next screen will show you a list of boards and there will be a Create Board button in the upper right. Click that button.

Select the type of board you want to create.

In the next screen you specify what you want to base the board on. Select Existing Project and click Next.

In the next screen you specify the name of the board, the projects to reference in it, and the location. You can select multiple projects here.

Note that the people who view the board will need to have Browse Projects permission for all the projects you select, and Jira Software Application access to see the board.

If another project is added to the system later, you can update the filter used by the board to include the new project. Creating the board creates a Saved Filter, so you would just have to update the Saved Filter for the board.

An alternative would be to create a Saved Filter first, and to not specify any Projects for that filter. In that case the filter would pull issues from every single project in the instance from now on, without having to be updated when new projects are added. Then when creating the board you would select Saved Filter instead of Existing Projects. But again, your users who view the board would have to have permission to all the projects in your instance.

The next question you need to ask yourself, though, is are you sure you really want one board that shows all issues? As more projects and issues are added to your system, the performance on the board will degrade. If the projects use different workflows then mapping statuses to columns on the board will become a maintenance issue. What problem are you trying to solve with this? And is this a problem that really needs to be solved? Do you really need a board for this? Is there another way to solve the problem?

[james_oleary]

This helped solve my problem, thank you. You make a good point about the scalability here, so I'll review with the team on if that's how we really want to do this. Thanks!

[John Funk]

Hi James - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You can do this, but it sounds like it would be a massive board with an unmanageable list of issues. But, you can give it a go. 

You just need to modify your filter where you say, Project in (project1, project2, project3, etc.) 

You just keep going until you have all of the projects. 

Or you might could create a ficticious status like DO NOT USE. 

Then use a filter like:

Status != "DO NOT USE"  that would get them all. 

[james_oleary]

Thanks! Yes, as pointed out by Trudy, this may not scale well. We're still testing what works best for our group. 

[John Funk]

It absolutely won't scale - see my first comment above as unmanageable. I would strong advise against it.