Non software development project planning in Jira

[Davin Studer]

I work for a medical institution and for the most part we don't do software development work. However, we do have LOTS of projects in our organization ... going forward I will call these initiatives to avoid confusion with the Jira project terminology. I work for IT and we would like to use JIRA to plan and track our initiatives. However, our initiatives usually have a start and end date, so to create a Jira project for each IT initiative I don't think would be the best way to handle it as they would only be active for a short time and we would quickly get project sprawl. Not to mention all our initiatives have similar fields that we would want to track. I've been mulling over creating a project for IT initiatives but the question is what is the best way to create tasks (issues) that are related to specific initiatives. My first thought was to create issue types for each initiative, but I quickly realized that is a terrible idea. Then I thought maybe I would create a custom drop down field with entries for each initiative. I think that could work. But then I noticed project components and I think these could also be used to group issues by initiative by creating a component for each initiative.

We would like to possibly use  Portfolio for Jira (and Jira Software as it is needed for Portfolio) to manage these initiatives and if that goes well consider bringing other departments in the organization into the fold so-to-speak. We like the planning visualizations that we can get out of Portfolio that could help us see where each of our teams are focusing on and where we are at in the initiative plans.

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on this. Have you tried something similar in your non software development shop? Are there other options that I have not considered that I should? Thanks in advance.

[Mesut Yilmazyildirim]

In my company, our sales teams also needs some kind of projects. They have lots of initiatives also.

As a result they started to use JIRA and using components for each initiatives. They are happy at the moment. They say that it is better to use JIRA instead of Excel.

Btw we are also interested in  Portfolio for Jira but not started to use it yet.

[Tracy N]

We tried setting up a Business type Project for our Project Managers and for Sales but this didnt suit, so I created a Software type project for Project managers and they use Epics as the projects and Tasks for the steps - this includes training, billing etc. I still havent found the best set up for Sales (without getting an add on or purchasing another product) I this adding custom fields and changing the workflow, a JIRA software project will possibly work. The main issue I find is that Resolution reason is global on all products which doesnt give good flexibility when using Projects for different business reasons.. but again - custom fields help there

[Victor Prasad]

Love the Non Software Examples!