Anyone found an efficient way to manage ERP/WMS implementation projects in Jira?

[Kyra Mayock]

Hi Community!

This is a pretty long winded question so apologies, but thank you in advance for any help!

I am a pretty well versed in Jira Software and I have used a couple of Jira Work Management Project previously so I know how to do all of the admin side of Jira, but, I am looking for the BEST way to manage a PMO portfolio of Cloud WMS Implementation projects simultaneously. I've seen somewhat related questions but none of the already posted answers really achieve what I am looking for so asking in a different way:

I *think* Ideally I would like to have 1 whole "project" template set up that I can clone, and the build a "plan" to look at an aggregated Gantt view of the whole portfolio and a "board" that pulls from all of the projects to delegate work to the consulting & integration teams. I know how to create plans and boards but I'm also interested if someone has done it better in any other way. For example, my first attempt at setting this up I had created 1 single "project" for the portfolio, and then I had created issuetypes of Project and Phase and made the hierarchy :

Project

Phase

Story/task

Sub-task

and I used the 3rd party App DeepClone to be able to copy the entire "project" structure, which was now just an "issue" but this seemed to get messy pretty quickly.

Our implementation methodology has the projects set up into Phases including:

1. Project Initiation
2. Discovery
3. Design & Configuration
4. Training & UAT
5. Deployment
6. Project Closure

We also have integration workstreams that get added to some of the projects and development feature enhancement work that gets added to some of the projects. The dev work is recorded in a different Jira Software project for our eng team. 

I need a way to visualize all 3 workstreams simultaneously and set dependencies with auto-adjusting start and end dates based on the dependencies (I don't think native Jira does this, so anyone have a suggestions for an app? that also might work with Deep Clone or something that copies projects & issues so the dependencies will stay in the new project once the clone has happened?)

So my main questions are:

1. What Jira product did you use to accomplish this? (Software, work management, something else?)
2. Did you use multiple projects, or create issuetypes that are projects and have it all in one?
3. What tool did you use or how did you set auto-adjusting start and end dates based on dependencies?
4. How did you structure your projects?
   1. Issuetypes, hierarchies, etc.?
   2. Did you use sub-tasks OR checklists for things like Draft 1 of Deliverable A, Draft 2 of Deliverable A, Review of Deliverable A with Client, etc.? Or something else, like maybe statuses?
5. How did you denote milestones (issuetype?, label?, custom field? etc)?

Starting to think it might be easier to revert back to Smartsheet for the project planning aspect but I feel like I am close to a good way to do this in Jira. 

Thanks!