Best Practices: Setting up JIRA for Software Implementations

[Ricky Lopez]

I run a growing Professional Services team of Project Managers, Implementation Consultants, Migration Specialists, Trainers, and Developers. We are responsible for implementing customers (79 current implementations) who purchase our software.

These implementations range in complexity with some being simple where we install and train to more complex where we have custom development work and multiple enterprise migrations. On larger projects, we invite our customers to join our JIRA projects so we can collaborate. 

We started using JIRA when we were a team of 2 and have now grown to over 25. I have been reading about best practices, but I have not seen a JIRA implementation that has clicked for our team. 

With 70+ implementations in flight, creating a Project for each becomes a bit of a mess. We aren't working on building software so we can't organize our projects per product.

Any direction or advice on approach would be very much appreciated. I'm all on board for using JIRA, but right now we are not effectively using it, and it's providing more pain than value. 

Thanks! 

[Matheus Fulginiti Schonarth]

Hi Ricky,

Welcome to the community! First off, thanks for sharing your business case - I think it's pretty interesting to try to find the best way to use Jira.

The go-to advice in most scenarios is to create a different project for each client, but I do understand that this would be the best for your case. You can maybe create Next-gen projects instead of regular projects, as they make administering Jira way simpler.

Maybe you could create a project for each stage of implementation (Implementation Consultants, Migration Specialists) to better split the teams. Not sure if this makes sense, but it's an idea.

Is there anything that some clients have in common so that you can maybe create one project for more than one of them?

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,

Matt

[Dan Crowley]

Ricky,

We are in a similar situation where we have the standard implementation tasks of preparing the client's environments, set up, training, data loads, and then almost always, some level of integration.  We've set up 1 project per client as a Software project that has the standard Epic, Story, Task, Bug but we really need to also be able to track client issues and risks.  We do that in Confluence but since the base type in Jira is an Issue, it makes more sense to me manage those there (it would also be nice to be able to share just those with the client).  I'm new to this position and Confluence.  I have some experience with Jira so I'm trying to work with our admin and teams to see what might make sense.  I'll report back if I get anywhere.

Thanks!

Dan