First time set-up for organization

[Anders Hebert]

We have purchased Jira Cloud for the entire company to use. Until now we have created projects based on either departments or cross-functional teams, when the need has arisen. But now we wish to gather all divisions, departments and teams in Jira in a structure that is sustainable in the long term. 

My aim is to set-up our organisation with divisions (with their departments and teams). As I understand it, Jira does not support hierarchy set-up (according to posts I read). So what stumps me is how I can create a structure that reflects the organisational structure.

We have 4 divisions: Finance, HR, Marketing and Research. 

• Finance division has 1 department (and a few additional employees not in these departments, they report directly to the division manager). 
• HR division has no departments, just a few employees
• Marketing division has 4 departments (and a few additional employees not in these departments, they report directly to the division manager)
• Research division har 4 departments (and a few additional employees not in these departments, they report directly to the division manager)
  
  There are several cross-functional teams and projects with members from different divisions and departments.
  
  

I would like to achieve the following in Jira:

That roadmaps and boards can be viewed as an entire organisation, per division, or as individual departments or projects/teams. Perhaps with a filter view?

I would like teams and projects to be able to assign tasks to each other.

In the future, we would like there to be one high-level backlog for the entire company, hierarchy one level above divisionen (senior management/strategic level)

Different teams and departments have very different maturity levels in using Jira and agil methods - so I do not wish to create a too rigid set-up that is exactly the same for everyone (eg. all will not use Scrum and sprints). Therefore I have looked more at using standard projects, rather than the company project set-up (which has a more "global" set-up).

We use basic set-up, no customised fields as of yet. 

I have experimented with creating a project for the Marketing division, creating epics for an overall roadmap - and using tags for each department. This way I have achieved a roadmap for the Marketing division, which I can filter the viewing per department if I wish. But I have a nagging feeling that maybe each department (and team, project) should have it's own project set-up - but how would I group these under one division?

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

Hi, @Anders Hebert. You did a great job outlining your needs :)

Ultimately, what you are going to discover is Jira is built for (project) teams. It's optimized around the idea that high-performing individual teams make successful companies. And, it's one of the reasons it's so popular.

In other words, it's not optimized for corporate-level planning, or strategic project portfolio management.  

Not to worry. Jira is so popular and successful there is a rich ecosystem of application developers who build solutions for Jira and some of them build solutions extend Jira to do exactly what you describe. And, Atlassian bought a company that resulted in the product Jira Align.

You'll have to figure out whether Jira Align or one of the Atlassian Marketplace apps for portfolio management is right (best) for your needs. In my experience the most popular (most installs / highest rated) are Structure for Jira and BigPicture.

Full disclosure: I work for a company that's affiliated with Structure.

The other thing you might want to consider doing is reaching out to an Atlassian Solution Partner or two.  They can help you navigate these waters and/or tune Jira to meet you needs.

I hope this helps!          

-dave

[Ismael Jimoh]

@Anders Hebert welcome to the Atlassian community.

I will try and assisting this question as best as possible though as you have read, there isn’t any proper solution for this out of the box in Jira.

First May so ask which Jira Cloud tier you are on? Standard or the tier above it? If you are on Standard then you may need to look at add-one as a potential way to build your organisation chart. However, if you are on Premium or Enterprise then you may be able to build the organisation chart within insight which comes bundled if you also have Jira Service Desk.

You can then use workflow conditions along with some custom automations via automation for Jira to handle some of the assignment based on the various departments and teams.

[Anders Hebert]

Hi Ismael, I believe we are using the standard Jira Cloud tier.

[Ismael Jimoh]

Here are some add-one that could help here;

• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1226316/org-chart-for-jira-cloud?hosting=cloud&tab=overview
• https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1225121/organizational-chart-for-jira-cloud?hosting=cloud&tab=overview
  
  

These may need some testing to see if they fulfil your requirements as I haven’t personally tested them.

Regards

[Anders Hebert]

Thank you, but these seem just to be visual add-ons that visualize how an organisational structure/diagram is built up.

I may have been unclear about what I would like to solve:. How I could set up projects that to reflect our organisation structure, having four divisions, several departments and teams. And for these to work together with epics and tasks cross-functionally - and see overall roadmaps, boards, etc.

[Debbie Higoy]

Hi @Anders Hebert 

I was curious to see what method you implemented for the scenario you shared?  Thx!