Best way to organize Jira Boards and Projects for our Operations organization? We are looking at setting up Jira Portfolio and Jira Service Desk so I want to organize to best leverage these projects.

[System Operations]

I'm trying to determine the best way to organize Jira Boards and Projects for our Operations organization? We are looking at setting up Jira Portfolio and Jira Service Desk so I want to organize to best leverage these projects. 

Specifically, I am wondering if we should have a separate Projects for each team (NetOps, DCOps, Helpdesk, etc) to track request or if it is better to have a single queue for all requests and then assign to the team within that project or if each team should have it's own "Requests" project. Additionally, should we have one Project for Incidents and another for Service Requests and another for each major project?

[Jack Brickey]

You are asking a number of questions here that seem to be intermingled. 

Projects: this is a bit of a personal preference. I would suggest that if you are going to manage the teams independently then having different projects is the way to go. You don't really want a project to have a lot of dissimilar & unrelated issues. I would go out on a limb here and suggest a project per group.

Boards & Filters: think of these as simply 'views' of a collection of issues that you wish to manage collectively. You can set up any of these across multiple projects. So having separate projects per group allows you treat them separately but by using a board/queue/filter allows you to combine into a single view.

Queues: these function on a per project basis.

Regarding your last question about incidents and service requests, IMO these should be Issue Types and not projects.

If it helps, in my scenario i have three projects: IT Helpdesk, Facilities, Staffing.

Hope this helps.

[System Operations]

Cool. Very helpful!

This makes sense as an approach but it doesn't seem to align completely with the way the data should be organized to get the best view across all teams. Perhaps this is a bit of a case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

How, for example, would you get the total number of incidents by priority across your entire organization? 

[Jack Brickey]

JQL --> Organizations = "organization_name" & priority = Highest

This filter could be used on a Dashboard, etc.. If you have many organizations and you want say the count by priority by organization you can use the Two Dimensional gadget.

Once you have experience playing around I think it will become more obvious.

[System Operations]

Thanks Jack, but that would just give you the highest priority Stories/Issues/etc. In this example I'm specifically looking for "Incidents" and, unless each project has an Issue Type of Incident with the same prioritization, states, etc. you won't get consistent tracking.

While you *could* do this by forcing all projects to have an "Incident" type with the same priority, components, and statuses it seems it would make more sense to have an "Incident" type of ticket which could be filed for any team. However, I'm not sure if this type of organization is possible which goes back to my initial question .

[Mari Car]

Thank you everybody!