I welcome progression and adopt new things unless impossible. I have been using Jira every day since 2011. I have used it for personal projects such as music production, professional projects for large international corporations, local small businesses, and probably hundreds of software projects in various languages and frameworks using Git for versioning. I don't get this new change quite yet. I'm trying. I'm substituting the word "project" for "space" when I think and talk out loud about it. Maybe those that work for Atlassian have thought a long time about this and they're correct and I just need to get comfortable with it. So, are we (and the rest of the planet) supposed to start calling Project Management, Space Management? Is the concept of a "project" in Jira a subset of a "space"? Why did the Jira "project" change to a "space" instead of the Confluence "space" change to a "project"? Will Atlassian have second thoughts and revert to "projects" in the future? I have many questions.
@Nerd Nathan I would advise that you separate the terms for where people work (space) with the process of manage a project. They are not the same and the only relation they have is that in a Jira Workspace you can track the work that is done in a Project (which in my case means an investment project and not an initiative inside an operational budget).
One Jira Workspace is not 1-1 with a project. You can have multiple projects inside a work space, and you can have multiple work spaces inside a project.
So a work space is where the work is being done, and project management is how you manage all aspects of your project, which is a lot more than just tracking work.
If you make that separation, then it should make more sense I hope.
@Nerd Nathan to add on to what @__ Jimi Wikman mentioned, the typical use-case of these workspaces that I have seen across various teams and companies is a very long-lived space that is customized for similar work items or teams to drive work forward with best practices from the Org as a whole, yet some slight nuances that differ for their specific team and admins specifically for their slice of the company (sometimes that is across multiple spaces or maybe just a single space that lives forever).
Whereas, a project in its definition seems to most typically be a very short-term segment of time with related work getting done. A project would have a start and end date, may have related projects, may follow the same rules as many projects before it, may be something completely new, etc. But it seems to be a much more granular container of work than what lives in Jira.
It is possible that some people were spinning up a Jira project for a short-term period, getting rid of it, and then creating another for every single small project that they run, but I have seen that to be an edge-case since these workspace settings lend themselves to more long-term work. Especially now since that sort of project seems to fit best attached to a Goal in Atlassian Home (that item had that same name of "project" and made things confusing, but it seemed to be the more accurate use of that term).
As you can probably tell, I think the naming change here makes a lot of sense, but I'm sure there are other thoughts around it. Hopefully that helps!
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