How to handle customers with Jira?

[Udo Held]

We are a small software development company. We have multiple customers that have one or more projects each. After a project is completed and billed its usually closed. For additional work we tend to open up a new project. There are some ongoing projects for support, etc. though.

We got a new fresh Jira 5 installation and Greenhopper.

I'm wondering what is the best idea to structure our Jira.

1. One approach would be to create a project for each customer project. However with the time we would have a huge number of projects in our list.
2. Another option would be to take the customer as the main entity and place the customer projects below that. The problem here is that I'm not sure what to use for grouping of the projects. Options could be components, custom fields, version, etc.

Currently the customer doesn't need access to his projects.

Whats the best practice to handle customers? Is there some built in functionality I'm missing?

[Renjith Pillai · Accepted solution]

Some thoughts.

If this 'additional work' is being done for the same product, then may be a new project for that customer is unnecessary, it could be a new version for the same.

And to group the projects across customers, you could use Categories.

And if the same product is being done for multiple customers, then it does not make sense to use categories. Since customfields/components is issue specific, you need to repeat in each of them. At a project level if you need to specify which customer uses which versions, a wiki page would be the best and the url of which could be put in the project properties.

[Udo Held]

Thanks for your feedback. The new project often comes for billing purposes. We aren't developing products.

[Udo Held]

We used the project-category for filtering customers. We grouped our projects to larger projects.