What is the best template to use for a single team with multiple projects?

[Nigel Hardwick]

I work in a small, self organising team and I want to know the best way to set Jira up for a single team with multiple projects and ad-hoc tasks. Do I use the team managed project template, create a single project for the team and then represent projects as issues and the underlying tasks as sub issues or should I create multiple projects and use a board to manage them.?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Nigel Hardwick 

Welcome to the community.

Do the projects have distinct release cycles?

Are you planning to work in a Scrum method, or a Kanban method, or will the team use both methods?

Are you planning to stay on the Free subscription or are you planning to move to a paid subscription?

How much control do you need to maintain over things like custom fields and workflows?

Should all members of the team have the same level of access to work with the issues in all "projects"?

Will all tasks across all "projects" follow the same workflow, and need to have the same custom fields?

What are your reporting needs for aggregating the data across all the "projects" into a single report?

One thing to be aware of if you choose to use Team Managed projects is that those do not directly support using multiple boards, or using one board to show all issues across multiple Team Managed projects. You can manually create a board from a Save Filter that pulls information from multiple Team Managed projects, but the board created in that manner does not function quite the same as the default board associated with a Team Managed project.

[Nigel Hardwick]

Hi @Trudy Claspill ,

Firstly, thanks for you time in answering my rather open ended question. Let me first answer you questions as best I can.

Do the projects have distinct release cycles? Yes, most projects are SW/HW implementations following the same methodology and software. We also undertake ad-hoc work from outside our team such as fault escalations.

Are you planning to work in a Scrum method, or a Kanban method, or will the team use both methods? I think Kanban will be more suitable as we are a small team, with 2 people doing implementations plus a PM. 

Are you planning to stay on the Free subscription or are you planning to move to a paid subscription? As we are a small team and will mainly using jira for project and issue tracking we will probably stay on the free version. However, we have a much larger team in the US that may look to adopt if this is successful.

How much control do you need to maintain over things like custom fields and workflows? This isnt too much of a concern at the moment although I noticed that there was no place for a project description in the team managed project.

Should all members of the team have the same level of access to work with the issues in all "projects"? Yes, its important for flexibility and resilience that all team members have equal access.

Will all tasks across all "projects" follow the same workflow, and need to have the same custom fields? Yes, certainly initially we will keep things simple. Once we are up and running we can start to look where we can make improvements by customisation 

What are your reporting needs for aggregating the data across all the "projects" into a single report? Aggregating across projects is not really an issue. As long as team members can see all tasks/issues assigned to them in a single view. Most data will be project based such as total hours per project.

I have tried creating a single team managed project for the team and adding projects as tasks and tasks as subtasks. This seems quite easy to manage and work with apart from the terminology is a bit confusing and Projects look very similar to tasks in the list. The board view is great though. Also, the fields in Tasks lend themselves perfectly for project details, such as a description field which doesn't seem to exist in a team managed project.

Its been a valuable exercise thinking about your questions so thanks once again.