Company-managed project setting (example)

[Thuy Pham]

Hi everyone, I assume I have Jira administrator roles. I come up with 2 questions:

(1) I have searched in community and read through several Jira support and could not find a good and clear example/ demo of a company- managed project.  Is there any available demo of a company managed project where we can see  and understand how it should be organized vs team managed project ( I'm ok with this for now).

Basically, we are a small business with 3 teams: customer service, wet-lab, technical. Each team have subtly different workflow with common task (orders). I want to build-up better workflow to track the issues (which are customer orders including a bunch of samples): from customer service team (at order- task level) to wet-lab team (at sample-subtask level) and  technical team (at sample-subtask level). Should I set up 3 different project for these 3 teams. The wet-lab, technical has some features that they only want to share within the team, not visible to other team.

(2) It seems that many talk about Jira software / Jira Service Management, we are considering Jira Work management. As I understand, JWM is included in Jira Software, should I switch to Software for more features( which might not be of need right now)

Thank you 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Thuy Pham 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

You should not assume you have Jira Administrator role without evidence. 

Do you see a gear/cog icon near your Avatar in the upper right corner, in the menu bar? If you click on it what options do you see? The available options will help us confirm if you are a Jira Administrator.

1. When you say the wet-lab and technical team have "features" that they don't want visible outside of their teams, what do you mean by "feature"? Are you talking about the Jira issues that they would be working on? Or are you talking about functionality of Jira that they would want to customize to suit their own purposes?

2. You mention you have "orders" comprised of "samples", and you seem to indicate that you would use the Jira issue hierarchy of Task and Subtask for tracking these items. You also mention that the customer service team works at the "order" (or task) level while the other two teams work at the "sample" (or subtask) level.

Subtasks cannot exist independently. They must be children of a task that is in the same Jira project as the subtask. Your answer to my first question (1) will impact how you can separate the work of these teams.

Regarding which Jira product you should use, that depends on more factors such as the type of reporting you might need, how you want to be able to grow the process in the future, and who outside of the teams doing the work might need access to any of the information or the ability to make requests for work.

[Thuy Pham]

Hi Trudy, thanks for your answer. Below is my clarification:

1 &2 . We have set up a team-managed project and want to upgrade to company-managed project to better track our service orders and remove the need to use other tracking platforms in use.

I think the Jira issue hierarchy of Task and Subtask for tracking these items is a good choice. Our orders (tasks) have varied number of samples (subtasks), with many custom fields. The customer service just care about the status of order (general workflow) and communal custom fields while wet-lab and technical team should track both orders and samples (specified workflow and secured custom fields, e.g. sample concentrations, QC/analysis results) 

The wet-lab and technical team have custom fields that they don't want visible outside of their teams. Should I (i) set up a separate (secured) project and how to link these issues/ child issues when they go through the process of each team (CS/ Lab/Tech). Or (i) just set security level at custom fields and only specified group of people can view/edit those fields in the same issues.

My diagram below should explain better:

3. Am I Jira admin? I got this from the cog icon. I cannot change the global permission and cannot view/ change the members in user/ group. Is there any admin roles that could configure global permission & user/ group member without the permission to manage payment/ license/Apps setup.

4. Which Jira product? I want to set up  anonymous users/ or only 1 licensed user seat for other team member that can only view issues in certain project  in my site to save the licensed seat that these information should not be open to outsiders. Plus, any choices to set up a customer user that can see general information to have a grasp of their order status by sharing a link?

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you

Thuy

[Trudy Claspill]

1 & 2: You cannot set up security levels for individual fields to hide the fields (and their content) from view.

If your technical and wet-lab teams have data/issue content that they don't want visible outside their teams, then having their work tracked as subtasks of the Orders/tasks that are visible to the customer service team is not the right solution. The customer service team will be able to see the content of subtasks that are children of the Orders/tasks they can see.

To keep the content of the subtasks hidden from the customer service team, the subtasks need to be in a different Jira Project to which the customer service team does not have access.

Since subtasks can be created only as child issues under another issue type (i.e. task) and the subtask and its parent must be in the same project, you would have to have a separate parent issue under which the subtasks could exist. And the customer service team would not be able to see that issue.

If the customer service team needed to be able to get some high level information about progress on the work, you would need to implement automation to synchronize information between the tech/wet-lab team parent issues and the customer service team issues.

3: It does look like you are a Jira Administrator. The next level of administration is Site Administrator. That level has access to payment information as well as access to manage user access to the site and products. It is not possible to have one permission without the other.

4: With the Jira Work Management and Jira Software products a user must be a licensed user to interact with the product. With the Jira Service Management product there is the concept of a Customer versus an Agent. A custom has limited access through a Customer Portal, and Customers are not counted towards your licensing cost. Each Agent must be a licensed user of the product. Agents have the ability to Edit and Transition issue that are in a Service Management project.

You can have all three products on the same site and specify each user's license for each product separately. One user might have only a Jira Work Management license. Another might have only Jira Software. Another might have only Jira Service Management. Or a user can have a combination of licenses. 

This document can help you understand what a user with a given type of license can do in projects created in the other products:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/overview-of-jira-cloud-products/

While anonymous users don't add towards your licensing cost, when you make a project anonymously accessible you are making the project accessible to EVERYBODY on the internet. You are not able to limit who has anonymous access. The information that your tech/wet-lab teams does not want visible outside their teams would become visible to anonymous users if their project had anonymous access enabled.

[Thuy Pham]

Hi Trudy Claspill,
I truly appreciate your detailed answer, and sorry for getting back after a long while as I have been working on your suggesting. There are some problems coming up, can you make any advice:

1. Following upon my last question. In order to keep track of workflow (number of sample working on each status, time tracking). Is it a good practice to:
(i) Set up different workflows with different status for tasks/orders on 3 projects?
(ii) Set up separate workflow for Order/Task and Sample/Sub-task or just keeping them the same?
I think of 3 approaches (below) to set up the workflow for wet-lab teams. Which one would you think is suitable and productive?

2. I am figuring out how to sync with the information between different projects.
What is the good way to synchronize the status of samples & orders: I can configure automation tool to change status of  tasks in project 1 to linked (cloned) tasks in project 2.
Often time, we have several number samples in an order. If I want set up the workflow of project 1 at sample/task levels, how to best synchronize samples/task 'status in project 1 to order/task ‘s status in project 2? The linked issues would be too many in this case, I am uncertain if it works.

3. As I know tasks and subtasks are default hierarchy levels in JWM, but I find it hard to track the progress of sub-tasks (status & time). Would utilizing other hierarchy level (epic story task sub-task) work better. I can only track progress by combining advanced filter and customized dashboard.

4. Is there a simple automation tool to create n number child-issues (manually trigger & prompt for user input). I have read this but it is quite complicated for me https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management-articles/How-to-create-dynamic-looping-in-Automation-for-Jira/ba-p/2293077#M267

So I have configured this below auto-tool but it does not work

I hope I made it clear. Let me know If you think a 1:1 meeting to discuss in detail is necessary. Thanks and look forward to hearing from you.

Thuy

[Muhammad Moazzam Hassan]

Please go through this link.

https://university.atlassian.com/uploads/resource_courses/targets/3641535/original/scormdriver/indexAPI.html

[Thuy Pham]

Hi Muhammad thanks for the help, I cannot access the link, could you please double check it. Many thanks