Can I log time on one issue but assign it across multiple projects?

[Steven White]

Hello all,

We are fairly new to using Jira and Jira Agile, and want to know if something is possible.

We currently have around 6 active projects and a further 4-6 in planning and pre-production. Within each of these project are tasks that get repeated over and over (management tasks, meetings etc....).

We would like to set it up that all of these tasks are put in one project, then when the user reports on their time they can assign that time against one of the "Actual" projects (so when the management and finance teams run their reports they can see with project the time has been assigned to.

At the moment we are having to input the same task in multiple project for the time to be reported on correctly.

[Jose M.]

If the Project "Common Task" will anyway include separated issues for the different software development projects, you can use a component to reference to each SW Project.

In this way, the component would be used as the connection to the SW Development Project:

Project     | Component    | Issue
Common Task | SW Project A | Issue-1
Common Task | SW Project B | Issue-2

etc.

It would even be possible to associate several "Components" to an issue under "Common Task", if in some cases it shouldn't make sense to report hours separately.

I hope, this helps a little.

[Steven White]

I think i understand and follow that. Will give than a go

[Pete Morrish]

I'm looking into something similar, I think. Essentially, we have members of staff that are cross-project. Said members of staff sometimes go on holiday. We need to be able to allocate and log that holiday time across the projects to which they're assigned in the correct proportion.

This feels like the same sort of problem as outlined above, but I do not understand the proposed solution. Could anyone shed some light?

[Steven White]

Thanks for the reply, will try to explain what we're after. Currently we have around a dozen active software development projects configured on Jira (each project is for an independent product). Finance track the amount of money spent on a project via the number of person days on a month to month bases, which is in return reported to the CEO and Senior management for reporting purposes. At the moment the Finance dept are running a "Project Pivot Report" and gathering the times for all projects. Within all the projects there are common tasks that appear in every project, For example; Outsource management Project Management Technical Support Management Meetings & Leads Time Prototyping etc... What we are trying to find out is can we create a project, lets call it "Common Task" and create the above tasks in that project, but when they log the time against the task we want to be able to to say that its associated to x, y or z project. So when the Pivot report is run it will track the time correctly. At the moment we are having to create these tasks in every project, so we are looking to have one task that we can associate logged time against multiple projects. I dont think we can do this via Epics, as we would still need to create the same task in each project.

[Jose M.]

Are you considering the use of sub-tasks, with one parent and several childs within a project, or the use of Epics, with different issues in Epic across projects? Your plans would be useful, in order to check how you handle it.