General board for entire organisation

[Anders Hebert]

I am often asked by our users of Jira Software, who work in multiple projects in organisation - how they can get an overview of all their tasks in one place. The "Your Work" area does not seem to help give this overview, as it just lists tasks assigned to you.

So far I have tried to solve this by creating a "general board" that filters on all projects in the organisation and all users.Then my train of thought is that on this board they would select themselves and get a nice overview based on status (and adding project Swimlanes to clearly distinguish which project the tasks are located in). 

However, I don't know if this is the best solution, as this board needs to be located somewhere (either in one project or on me, as an admin). 

I would appreciate any suggestions or tips.

Using Jira Software premium cloud. Projects are Company Managed.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anders Hebert 

By "all their tasks" do you mean the task where the user is the Assignee currently? You said

The "Your Work" area does not seem to help give this overview, as it just lists tasks assigned to you.

Is the problem that it is a list, or that it is only the tasks assigned to the current user?

If it is the list view that is the problem, here are two alternate solutions:

Solution 1:

1. Create a saved filter. Share it with All Logged In Users.
assignee=currentUser()

2. Direct the users who want to view their work to make an agile board (scrum or kanban) based on that saved filter copy of that board and specify themselves as the location.

When they are viewing that board it will show their name rather than a project name at the top of the left-side panel.

Since the board is based on "currentUser()" whomever is viewing the board will see the issues assigned only to them. They can choose to re-arrange the columns to suit themselves and set up swimlanes.

However, they should not run their own sprints in this board. An issue can be in one and only one sprint at a time. If they set up their own scrum board and start adding their issues to sprints in it, then in the team boards those issues can't be added to team sprints.

I recommend the users set up a kanban board. They can add the Sprint field to the card display if they want to see which issues are in sprints.

Solution 2:

If you don't want to bother the users with creating their own boards then you could:

1. Create a dummy project.

2. Give everybody Browse Projects permission, but no other permissions.

3. Create a saved filter. Share it with All Logged In Users.
assignee=currentUser()

4. Create a board from that filter. Attach the board to the dummy project.

Then users could view that board and see just the issues assigned to them. Since this would be a shared board the users would not be able to modify the board configuration to suit themselves.

[Anders Hebert]

Thank you @Trudy Claspill solution 2 worked really well!

It solved my "problem" of a general overview board having to be located in a specific project. This new project (named as our organisational name) is now available to all users.

I created a few filters:

1) From the individual users perspective (currentuser), three different quickfilters, on all projects in the organisation:
- tasks assigned to currentUser()
- tasks created by currentUser()
- tasks assigned or created by currentUser()

2) From team and teamlead perspective I created quickfilters based upon: team members (users)

3) From av department perspective I created quickfilters that simply filters the Jira projects that the department owns (for managers needs)

All of these combinations, along with standard filtering options (multipick users, tasks, epics and labels) can be combined together.

I am now considering to create additional filters, such as an overview for specific task handovers between teams and/or departments.

I would like to clean up this new "overview" Jira-project more, for example to not allow new tasks to be created in this project (as it is designed to give an overview, rather than managing tasks) - or for the Timeline to be shown (as it does not manage this, due to Timeline only works on single projects)

[Trudy Claspill]

I'm glad my suggestion helped you resolve your requirement @Anders Hebert 

To prevent users from creating issues in the Overview project, modify the Permission Scheme used by that project to take away the Create Issues permission from all users. You may need to have a separate Permission Scheme for this project alone so that you don't impact other projects.

Regarding the Timeline, unfortunately you will not be able to add a Timeline view for this cross-project board as that is not supported. According to your post tags you are on the Premium subscription, so you could create an advanced roadmap Plan that uses the same saved filter. Give all users Viewer access for Plans (in the Plans / Settings configuration). You can even add a shortcut to the plan in the navigation panel for the overview project.

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Anders Hebert 

You are correct. A team board always has a single location. Besides having projects with their own agile boards, you can also create a Team project for task management, independent of the Project projects.

Create a new agile board in the Team project with a exhaustive filter covering all projects the team works in (and has access to). Using the Team functionality in Jira, you can set the team to all their tasks (independent from Assignee) and filter the board as such.

You may want to base Swimlanes based on planned work (projects and changes) and unplanned work (f.e. support).

[Anders Hebert]

Thank you @Dave Mathijs - I sort of understand what you mean, but not entirely.

Do you suggest to create a new Jira Project and use filtering to allow all projects (and their tasks) to be included in this Jira Project Board?

The Team functionality you propose, do you mean Teams, as in the assigning Jira users to a specific team (grouping members)?

Sorry, so many different terms and function names, it makes it difficult for me to understand :-)

[Dave Mathijs]

I mean to create a Jira Project for each team and use that project as location for your team board.

Yes, I'm referring to Atlassian teams

Sorry if it's confusing, don't hesitate to ask clarification.