Why do you need to assign an issue to a project in service desk?

[Tim]

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would I need to assign a user issue for a broken keyboard to a project? I kind of understand the backend requirement, that all issues need projects. But why logically? Can't service desk have separate areas then project issues? I like the overall software, but am hung up on this. And I know my management will be as well. 

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey Tim,

Projects are simply a way of grouping JIRA issues. The grouping in projects allow you to assign various configurations (issue types, permissions, workflows etc). 

Why do issues “Have” to go in to a project? In our organization we have 30+ JIRA service desk projects and growing. A few of them are your traditional IT Service projects that might have requests like “new keyboard”, but they’re broken in to different projects cause one is for one sub-companies office on one continent, another is a global set of offices for another sub-company etc etc. Each of these has their own users (agents and customers), SLAs, queues etc. The other JSD projects are then for a variety of customers - all with their own distinct requirements. 

While this may may seem like overkill if you only have one initial need, the configuration needs to be able to grow with your organization. We started with one JSD project as well - and a handful or JIRA software projects (greenhopper back in the day) and now have almost 10,000 projects. There’s hundreds of different configurations in those projects, and having no way of grouping them wouldn’t give you this flexibility.

CCM

[Vaughn Dumas]

10000 projects?  Wow!  And I thought my 21 was a lot.  Any strategies you care to share for managing all of this?

Cheers,

Vaughn

[laralg]

Hi Tim,

I think you are getting this wrong. Do no think as a project as you normally do. A project in jira is just a way of grouping different types of issues.

Maybe you want a Service Desk for human resources where their issue types and workflows are completly different than a support one.

Thats their only use.

Some people need different projects, but a lot of Service Desk just need one. If you only need one project, go for it! You can group your issues in lots of different ways inside our project, the project is just the way everything is held together.

Regards

[Vaughn Dumas]

Hi Tim,

What we did in our organisation was to group different kinds of requests into projects.  We considered a project nothing more as a grouping of request types.  We ended up with 4 projects and were able to assign different roles to each, also ensuring that security was considered (some people should not see everything we do here).

This seems to work very well for us. 

All the best,

Vaughn

[Tim]

I get what you are saying, but to me the grouping should be done with issue types and a category of issue. For example, 'hardware issues' as a category. 

It just really bugs me that replacing a keyboard is considered part of a 'project'. Unless 'Projects' are their way of grouping Change Requests, Service Requests, and Incident Requests?