Create additional level between Project and Issue levels?

[Jonathan Dramond]

Hi there,

Our organisation is looking to use Jira to fully break down and organise all issues into various departments - so that we can track time and costs for each area.

Many of our clients use a number of services that we provide so we are looking to create sub-projects in a way, that are visible when you create an issue. Therefore, when an administrator clicks on the CREATE ISSUE button, we would like the following available for selection:

PROJECT / CLIENT

------------------

DEPARTMENT

------------------

ISSUE TYPE (the issue type scheme will be assignable to the department rather than project)

<followed by the standard fields such as Assignee, Reporter, etc>

Currently as per default JIRA, we only have the Options of PROJECT and ISSUE TYPE available...

Does anyone know if it is possible to add an additional level above issue type?

We have tried the 'Structure' plugin, but we believe that there is a lot of administration involved to maintain it, and it is all done at 'issue-level' - ideally if we had this extra level between Project and Issue type, the process would remain straightforward upon creating an issue and it would organise automatically.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

No. The whole reason Structure was written was to provide more than the layers Jira uses. There's actually four, or two, depending on how you look at it - Category, Project, Issue Type and Sub-task, but as far as configuration goes, it's issue-type and project. (Category is for a bit of reporting, and sub-tasks, while a decent logical layer, are effectively just issue types for configuration)

To inject such a layer, you'll need to rewrite a large chunk of Jira, or insert something that does it, liek the Structure plugin does.

[Jonathan Dramond]

Hi Nic,

Thanks for your advice. To avoid rewriting Jira, we are going to proceed with the workaround as stated in the above comment.

Regards

Jonathan

[Jonathan Dramond]

Hi Jessica,

Thanks for the advice - we are going to proceed with your suggestion by using 'Project' for the department, and then using categories for each client.

Regards

Jonathan

[Jessica_Moszkowicz]

Would components help to do this? Each "department" could be a component in the project. I don't know, and I'm guessing not based on Nic's answer, if you can tie an issue type scheme to a component though. Also, components are not shared across projects, so component "C1" in project "P1" is not the same as component "C1" in project "P2". You can search for all issues in componenets with the exact same name across projects though. They're just not technically the same component, I think.

If the issue type scheme is the real problem here and this has to be based on the department, why not switch things so that "departments" are represented as JIRA projects and "project/client" is represented as components?