How to represent the Customer?

[Rasmus Lock Fuglsang]

Hi.

We are trying to roll-out JIRA in our organization (a rather small one), but we have some challenges, as to how to represent the customers.

We have app. 100 different customers, and we want to keep track of issues both belonging to our R&D activities as well as tasks related to a customer.

I.e. R&D: "Develop some new feature A" -> might be related to some customer requirement for Cust A,B and C.

Customer: "Rollout release X.Y to Customer A" is only related to Cust A.

Our original thought was to create Customer Projects.

But - that means duplicating ALL our release-versions from the R&D project to all our customer projects (if we were to correctly maintain the Rollout task denoted above).

Next was perhaps introducing some CustomFields for customers, and then just having all issues in one project, but that simply doesn't seem feasible.

So, the question:

"What is a good way to model/represent the customer in a Jira environment - NOT a ServiceDesk, and the "customers" will NOT have access to Jira"?

[Rasmus Lock Fuglsang · Accepted solution]

Since labels doesn't entirely support what we need, we've decided to introduce a CustomField, and make it behave like the labels.

Meaning:

a) CustomField:

b) Simply add all our customers as values for the custom-field:

That way, we can ensure the list of customers are uambigious, and that we get the "label" feel, when tagging-issues to customers.

Not sure how well this will work though, but I have high-hopes :D

[Rasmus Lock Fuglsang]

For people looking further into this, there's a plugin allowing for easy maintenance of per-project custom-fields for multi-selection:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/jira.plugin.projectspecificselectfield.jpssf

[Rasmus Lock Fuglsang]

Yes, We are considering that. Unfortunately, labels are a somewhat error-prone solution.

I.e. if anyone mis-labels, or misspells the customer, we won't necessarily notice.

All things aside, it seems like the best option currently.

Also, since "customers" won't have their own entity, it makes it hard to say list all the customers, or create certain tasks for all customers (i.e. "Rollout release X.Y to Customer N" would have to be manually created for ALL our customers).

[Andris Grinbergs]

I would use labels to specify for which customers this issue is related...