How to convert existing Team managed project to a company managed project

[Eran Haskel]

How to convert existing Team managed project to a company managed project ?

I do not want to migrate the issue but to change the project configuration to a company based project.

Thanks 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Eran Haskel 

Welcome to the community.

It is not possible to convert a Team Managed project to a Company Managed project. The only option is to create a new Company Managed project and move the issues from the Team Managed Project to it.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/migrate-between-next-gen-and-classic-projects/

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Eran Haskel -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Yes, and...to what Trudy notes:

Here is the same link she provided, but for Jira Software Cloud (not JSM): https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/migrate-between-team-managed-and-company-managed-projects/

Please ensure you read about the limitations of the switch, including settings and field impacts.

Best regards,
Bill

[Trudy Claspill]

Oops! Thanks for fixing my error @Bill Sheboy 

[Nikki Dorado]

Hi,

Aside from issues, is there a way to migrate the workflows (custom or otherwise) from a team managed project to a company managed project or will they have to be recreated?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Nik Dorado

[Trudy Claspill]

There is no feature to migrate workflows from team managed projects to company managed projects @Nikki Dorado . The workflows have to be recreated in the company managed project.

[Nikki Dorado]

Thanks for clarifying this Trudy. Much appreciated.

[Tammy Perrin]

This seems like a basic configuration capability that is needed. When creating a new project, you cannot reuse the same name, issue key, etc.

[Trudy Claspill]

@Tammy Perrin 

Are you trying to create a new project that has the same name, issue key, etc. as a project that currently exists, is archived, or is in the trash? Or are you trying to reuse information for a project that has been fully deleted?

[Tammy Perrin]

Ideally you could keep the same project and just make a simple settings update to switch from team-managed to organization-managed. Currently, you have to create an entirely new project, and for that you are not allowed to re-use issue keys, for example. You lose a ton of settings and work, all for a configuration change.

[Trudy Claspill]

Team Managed and Company Managed projects use fundamentally different architectures.

Company Managed projects use schemes to store configurations:

Custom Fields, Field Configurations, Field Configuration Schemes

Issue Types, Issue Type Schemes

Screens, Screen Schemes, Issue Type Screen Schemes

Workflows, Workflow Schemes

etc.

The schemes are stored separately from, and can be modified separately from, the projects. The schemes can then be associated with 1..n Company Managed projects. The use of schemes makes these items reusable between Company Managed projects.

Team Managed projects store all the comparable information as part of the one project. They were not intended to be reusable or shared. The configuration of a TM project is intended to be manageable by Project Admins with no impact to any other project in the system. In some cased, such as workflows, the fundamental implementation of the functionality is also different. There is not a one to one correlation between the TM and CM configurations.

It would be, I assume, a huge amount of work to "convert" all the configuration elements from one architecture to another, when they were never designed to support that type of conversion.

It is like saying you should be able to make a few simple changes to your sedan car and turn it into an Indy race car.

[Tarek Raffa]

Thx a million for the detailed explanation

[James Mallorie]

Cloning projects from Team to Company

You have two options for migration... 

1. move all the tickets from one project to another project. Because of the inherent difference between the two structures, you will have to decide if you want to either

move the ticket form one to the other. This will mean that all custom field values are lost in the move (this means any custom fields you have setup and added to tickets with information added, text or numerical, will be lost.) Unfortunately due to the way Jira works (using custom fields for story points) it also means you will loose all your points data.

2. Second option is to export and import the ticket raw data, this unfortunately means you wil loose all of your comments on the tickets. but you will keep the points. as far as i can tell, but you will not be able to work on the tickets while either of these two options are happening and either option is prettly poor.

There is a third option i have found. using a plugin to clone each of the epics. However we still have that issue of custom data. For us that means the custom text fields that include ‘user story’ and ‘acceptance criteria’ along with story points, which is pretty crucial for us. along with the commentary. So how do we get all the commentary, as much custom data as possible and can do it in a way that our teams can still work on the tickets/epics in the old project?  

Setup …

Create the new company managed project 

Add in any custom fields and apps into the new project and get it setup as you would like. 

Get custom field data

Jira will not transfer any custom values from custom fields (including points) To get around this problem I have created a manually triggered automation that you can use on the epic in the source project that will scan through each of the child tickets of that epic, and pull (user story, acceptance criteria & story points) from customer fields and add it the jira default fields (issue.summery) so that when you clone the issues into the new project you will have all the information from those custom fields. The user story & acceptance criteria is appended to the main description and the ‘story point estimate’ is added to the original estimate as time (to be converted back to points automatically later with a different trigger)

First step then is to create and trigger the automation that updates all customer fields to jira default fields.

Here is the automation i used to trigger on each epic..

 

Clone to new project

Once you have all the custom field information on your tickets within an epic, you can then clone the epic into your new project. I have found the best way to do this is by using a tool called Deep Clone, you can then create all the settings you want for cloning, which project to clone to (pay attention to each part of this process) then when you are happy with the clone settings I suggest you use this as a template-preset that you can save and use each time you clone a new epic to save time and mistakes.

follow the steps in the deep clone plugin

before you close the screen make sure that there are no errors on ticket clones. You can see the new and old ticket here that might have parts that do not clone.

This can take a little time depending on the number of tickets you have, but once finnished you will have the epic, and all the children including relationships in the new project. However there is still some tidy up to do. You will need to pull all of the points information back out from the ‘original estimates’ field and convert from time back to points. This was a pain so i have created another automation that can be triggered on the epic that runs through each of the children, and converts the ‘original estimate’ field from time to points and then updates the ‘story points’ field in the new project. This is the automation I used, the converts time back to points when triggered on the epic (for all children in the epic). 

 

Clean up

Thats it. you now have your epic and children in the new project with the new structure under the hood, and you have not lost any point information or custom-filed information, relationships or comments. The only last tidy-up if you want to do so is pulling the user story back out of the description and back into custom fields on the new project. if you want to, also you now have two projects (team & Company) so its your call if you want to delete the old one right away, or i would suggest keeping for a few weeks/months until you are happy you have all you need in the new project.

No getting around it, migrating from team-managed to Company-managed isn't that easy but this helped me, migrate without any down-time for the team. I hope it can help you too.