Multiple Boards or Multiple Projects?

[Lasse Linzer]

I need an answer for my particular use-case, which probably arises from missing understanding of the difference between boards and projects.

I manage a small Product Team (which supplies the necessary specs and user stories), an inhouse Scrum Team and 2 external Teams through Kanban.

Should I create multiple Projects or should I try to create multiple Boards for one Project?
I worry that I won't be able to handle the permissions regarding the workflows, tickets and viewing rights. Especially as the external Ressources could change from time to time.

Thankful for any advice,
Lasse

[Grigory Salnikov]

Hello @Lasse Linzer 

I think the quick answer to your question is to create multiple projects. The difference between projects is issue types, sets of fields, states, transitions, etc. It's safe to say that different projects may differ drastically whereas boards are in fact just visually organized filters within one project.  

[Merve Nur Bas]

Hi  @Lasse Linzer

do your teams work on the same product or with the same backlog? In that case it makes sense to create different boards within a project. 

If your teams work on different things (different backlog), you can also use different projects. Different projects would also be necessary if you want to have different issue types, permission or notification schemes, but also different workflows for the same issue type. 

For the externals, you can easily create a groups dedicated to them and grant permissions based on this group (the users should not be included to other groups with more permissions though).

My best

Merve

[Dave Markowski]

Hey Merve - I have teams working on the same backlogs.  Think the multiple boards would work for that project? if so how do you recommend separating the issues out?  I have used the teams field but looking to see if that is the most effective way to do this.  

[Jayme Vasquez]

@Dave Markowski I have used Components to help sort the work for the different boards. It's also nice because you can assign a default assignee to Components so if you have a team lead for each board, you can use the Component to tag them in and they can delegate to the rest of the team. I also like that you can group by Component in Advanced Roadmaps, so if you need to organize or plan work within a single project, it helps get a higher level view. 
Cheers!
Jayme V

[Peter Van Geenhoven]

I don't see anyone mention security as a constraint in your selection on how to manage your IT organisation.

We are using different projects for different teams for the simple reason that we don't want our (remote) front-end teams to have access to our back-end board and backlog which contains or may contain information that we don't like to see disclosed. For that reason I even created an "Epic Tracking" project in which I define the Epics...every group has access to this project so that every group can see the Epic for a story mentioned in the story...

So far I was pretty happy with the setup, but I am now seeing that the Roadmap feature is something that doesn't work properly for us out of the box: within a project your roadmap will only include tickets from your project, and not cross-project... 

All in all I think Atlassian tools are very useful, but they do have their limitations and especially the security bit of Atlassian makes it quite tedious to get right at times

[Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_]

Hi @Lasse Linzer 

In our company, we use different projects for each department team (developers, support and marketing team etc.). And different sprints (bourds) we use for each workflow periods.

But it depends on your needs. You can read more about bourds here https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/what-is-a-board-764477964.html

And about Jira Scrum Boards here https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/scrum-boards 

Hope it helps

[Brad]

How do you guys manage filtering boards to only show tasks and epics within that sprint backlog?  Seems this way always shows all backlog items, not just those created when inside a specific board?