Should I divide the workflow into multiple projects?

[Alexander Isacson]

I'm among other things responsible for providing product ownership, software development and customer service desk together with my team.

I have elected to use JIRA and JIRA Service Desk for all three processes. And very simplified the process looks like this:

1. Tickets first enter our Service Desk. If they can solve it they solve it but if they can't they will pass it on to the products owners.
2. The product owners assess business value, urgency etc. and decide if the issues should be closed or added to the backlog.
3. If added to the backlog the development team go ahead and develop the new features, fixes the bugs etc.

My question is if I should use one project to represent the whole flow or if it is better to use three projects in this case. I have not found a way to automatically move an issue from one project to another which would be in favor of having a single big project and workflow. (I know you can manually move a ticket from one project to the next but that requires quite allot of clicks).

However, if I use one big project the status categories would make no sense. I would like to consider a service desk request done if we report back to the customer that we have passed a new feature request along for prioritization. That issue would be done from a service desk perspective but in progress for the product owners (and it might become a to-do for development). It is important that there is a link between the service desk request and the issue in the new projects.

My teams work very independently and ideally, I would like to give them their own projects which they can customize as they want. If one team for some reason finds it necessary to create two different statuses for 1st and 2nd code-review and another team doesn’t they should be able to set that up. That goes against having a single project...

What is a good practice when it comes to passing information (i.e. requests and tickets) between different functions that creates as little overhead as possible?

[David Berclaz]

It highly depends of your context. In the case you are dealing with several applications, a good way to do is the following:

• 1 Jira project per application (as the versions/releases are linked to the project)
• 1 Jira project for the Service Desk, with issues like incidents, problems and evolution requests. Those issues will be linked (and not moved) to issues (Bugs, Stories, etc.) present in the applications Jira projects

Hope it helps!

[Alexander Isacson]

Thanks @David Berclaz

In my case we only have one application but I see your point. But should the service desk agent manually create a Bug and link it to an incident even if the incident contains all the relevant information and screenshots and so on?

Is there some shortcut to conveniently create an issue in a project and link it back to the original in JSD request?

[David Berclaz]

Yes, you can do it. Refer to the Create linked issue blog post.

[Alexander Isacson]

Great - didn't know that. Thanks.

[David Berclaz]

You're welcome!