Question on Jira Board Structure and Best Practices

[Gee Espiritu]

Hello, everyone!

I'm curious about the best practices for using Jira Software. I'm currently talking to our Project Management Office (PMO), and they've asked me for a recommendation on the best way to structure our boards.

So far, our plan is to have an intake process in Jira Service Management. Once an intake is approved, we'll transfer the data to a Jira Software board for project management.

My question is, what's the best board structure for this? Should it be per project? Or should we have a board per team, with projects designated as Initiatives within it?

P.S.

Apologies if this was already asked but I just want to see your thoughts and experience.

[Dick · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gee Espiritu Welcome to the Atlassian Community

At our university, we do the latter: We have designated teams that each have a Jira Space to track their issues of the projects they do work for.  The work items can be of all issue types, as we use components to discern the projects. That way, you can still have the whole tree of the high-over strategic thoughts (management will be happy) and the low-level tasks-to-be-performed of the project (the team knows what to do) in one Jira Space together

Kind regards,
Dick

[Gee Espiritu]

Thanks for this, Dick! So every new project for the team will be inserted in one board, right? And will you just have a hierarchy like this: from Initiative to Epic to Task and down to Subtask?

I have a quick follow-up question: How do you handle dependencies with other teams? For example, if you have a task that another team will be working on, are you going to add them to your board so they can have a view?

[Dick]

Hi @Gee Espiritu ,

New projects for a team will be inserted into their project, which is visible on their board.

Remember that work should be entered into the Jira Space of the team that actually does the work. 

So if team B supports an epic of team A, team B creates the work item in their own Jira Space and link it to the epic of team A using the epic link field.

Subtasks do not follow this regime. These are linked to stories without a separate link field.

Kind regards,
Dick

[Anthony Cast]

We do intake and enterprise IT project request prioritization through JSM and work item types of Project and Idea therein. Once a Project has a business case, is of sufficient priority with governing bodies, and has available resources, we spawn a dedicated PRJ#-keyed Jira and Confluence pairing for delivering that project in full by the PMO. Those spaces are full of Epics needed to deliver the work, benefit from the Timeline feature, and gated project/space-level permissions, which often includes org-external contributors.

[Gee Espiritu]

Thanks for this, Anthony!