Best Practice: Keep multiple customers in one project or create an own project for each customer?

[Clemens Rätze]

I am asking for the experience of other experts. 

When we setup a new service management instance, should we keep multiple customer-company in one project or or create an own project for each customer-company?

For me the big advantage in the separation is, that you can share customer specific fields with existing internal projects of e.g. jira software. So when we decide to create an internal ticket based of the service management ticket, we already have most of the metadata already and share it transparently with our customers.

Would you agree with me or is there any other best practice established already?

[Alex Koxaras -Relational- · Accepted solution]

Hi @Clemens Rätze 

If you are providing services common to all your customers and these do not differentiate, then you don't have to have different projects. You can use organizations to separate the issues from one customer to another and your agents will not have to switch back n forth to XX service desks.

If the services you are providing to customers are significantly different, then this could be a good reason to separate the projects, only for those customer who required special attention (workflow, fields, etc).

But prior of doing the above, laying down all requirements is a must. Then a careful design of the solution should be implemented. 

[Clemens Rätze]

Thank you for your answer. The services and workflows will be mostly the same. 

But I would like to have the possibility to use company specific fields. This would only be possible, if I separate in the companies to different projects, right?

[Alex Koxaras -Relational-]

It depends. Do these company specific fields have to be visible to your customers?

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello @Clemens Rätze 

It depends on how much work you want to put on your agents. You can still have company specifc fields that can be hidden when empty. However, this does require the agents to fill in the specific fields when creating an issue.

You could also create different screens for the companies which have to be filled in when transitioning an issue.

In the end, it depends on how much effort you want to put into it and how many customers you have. However, as @Alex Koxaras -Relational- mentions, it all starts with the detailed requirements and desired outcome

[Clemens Rätze]

I would like to give the customers the chance to fill in the specific fields. So yes, they should see them.

@Paul Wiggers You mentioned, that I can create different screens for different companies. Could you please explain to me, how this can be set up?

[Paul Wiggers]

If you need customers to fill in the field, then it becomes a lot harder. You could work with requests types but that will expose customer names to others, something that might not be feasable.

You can use the screens on the JSM agent side. You could create seperate statusses for different customers and show the screen during a transition.

[Alex Koxaras -Relational-]

@Paul Wiggers can't really understand this:

You could work with requests types but that will expose customer names to others, something that might not be feasable.

@Clemens Rätze you can indeed use screen from the customer side, if and only if (iff) you buy an app which support this type of action, like the following one:

• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1213697/actions-for-jira-service-management?hosting=cloud&tab=overview (free app)
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1229532/customer-actions-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

But even if you install such an app, my strong advise would be to:

1. write down your requirements
2. find possible solutions
3. write down pros and cons of these solutions
4. Pick the better one
5. Implement it on a test project
6. Test it
7. Move to production

[Paul Wiggers]

@Alex Koxaras -Relational- 

You can create a request type for each customer such as: ServiceRequestCustomer1

Then you can set up the request type with the specific fields. This is a lot of work, can show customer names to other customers and all in all is just a bad idea.

@Clemens Rätze Go with Alex's suggestion

[Alex Koxaras -Relational-]

@Paul Wiggers thank you for clarifying this! But as you already mentioned, this is huge amount of maintenance and, you well stated, exposure of client's name to other people. And above all the things you mention, you will end up using (Original Request Types * Customers) on your service catalogue. That's a lot of RTs

[Clemens Rätze]

Thank you for your help so far, you have given me very valuable input.