Need to help deciding best set up for multiple projects w/ cross-project tasks/dependencies.

[Jacqueline Sowell_ PMP]

I'm managing a marketing team that includes

• marketing content management
• marketing campaigns
• website
• subsite design & development
• membership & marketing 

And soon I'll set up a project for construction project management that Marketing won't own but will have tasks.

I've set them up as separate team projects, even though there is some overlap of team members. The only projects that are populated are website and membership & marketing - both imported from Trello, so now is the best time to make major changes if needed.

Is there a better way to set up my organization? Does one create mulitple boards within projects? Something else? I'd like to get the setup right before I show it to Leadership on Tuesday afternoon. If they like what they see, the whole company will start using Jira.

One last note: I want to use forms to enable the members of our makerspace to make task requests. That's possible on the marketing project management project but not possible as far as I can tell on the Website project template.

Thanks in advance!

[Laura Campbell _Seibert Media_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jacqueline Sowell_ PMP and welcome to Community!

The "best" way to set up Jira is the way that works for your team, so before they start using it you can't really say if it's the best way.

But I can address a couple things:

• Boards display issues based on filters, so you can either decide to show lots of issues on a board, or create multiple ones to only display specific kinds of issues. And boards can display issues from multiple projects, which can be helpful if people are involved in tasks created in multiple projects. Check out the documentation for more help.
• Jira Work Management projects (or business projects) have a basic form feature, which is what you are probably seeing on the marketing project. If you need more sophisticated forms or you want to be able to manage queues because you'll have a lot of requests, Jira Service management might be better suited. 

You mention that the marketing team used Trello before. What did the other teams use? what problem are you trying to solve by moving the entire company to Jira? I think the answers to those questions will help Community members to give you more advice.

[Jacqueline Sowell_ PMP]

Regarding what problem I'm trying to solve with Jira, I'm looking for a lot of the classic project management tools, like Gantt charts to track dependencies visually, time estimation for tasks, and a good overview of status.

Past Lives so far is using a mishmash of Trello, spreadsheets, Google Drive, documents and email to communicate and document tasks. The business is growing and maturing, so it's time to create a unified solution to make us more efficient and accountable. That being said, we have two very different businesses under one roof, a membership-driven makerspace and a small-scale design+build construction operation. I'd like the setup to keep the two arms of the company separate yet communicating.

So how best to structure projects, boards and what templates to choose are open issues. I'm getting a sense that I can set up a company-managed board and then set up filters to view the separate team-managed projects that I've created. As long as the filters work across different templates, that's sounds like an option. I'm open to advice. I'm really out of my league here. I've always been at companies who hired venders to do this kind of setup.

[Jacqueline Sowell_ PMP]

Directions:

1. Go to your board, then select more - Board settings.

2. On the Board settings screen, select the desired tab (Columns, Swimlanes, etc).

I was going to set up multiple boards to show specific issues. Beginning to wonder if my free account doesn't support this feature because I don't see it when I go to my company managed project. Either that or something in my setup is wrong.