How to efficiently manage multiple client projects in Jira without workspace clutter?

[Walton David]

Hi community,

I'm currently working as part of a development team, and we manage multiple client projects simultaneously using Jira Software. As the number of clients has grown, we’ve started facing challenges around:

• Keeping projects organized without overwhelming the workspace

• Managing different workflows for each client

• Keeping dashboards and filters clean and relevant

• Ensuring permissions are properly segmented across internal and external team members

What are some best practices for handling this kind of multi-project environment in Jira?
Would using a separate Jira project per client still scale well in the long run?

Our team at DigitalDriv has been exploring ways to streamline Jira setups for agencies handling many clients, and we’re looking to refine our internal structure based on community input.

Would really appreciate any advice, setup examples, or insights from others handling similar setups.

Thanks in advance!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Walton David ,

I'm guessing all of these clients/projects are on one site?

If so, I'd recommend things like:

• 1 Jira project per client
• Naming convention> quite important!
  Whether regarding projects, categories, configurations...
• Try to standardize workflows and other configuration items. It would be best if all projects used the same configurations (at least from the maintenance perspective); but again, keep it modular wherever needed
• Same work user/group management - naming conventions are important and try to use 'modular permissions' as much as possible. Meaning, give permissions via project roles rather than specifying groups and people directly within the scheme
• As for filters and dashboards, pretty much the same thing applies > try to generalize everything as much as possible. Create dashboard 'templates' and for filters, use dynamic functions such as currentUser() rather than hardcoding user groups or individuals

We just had one implementation where initial idea was to group everything under same 'hat'. That didn't work out as expected so we ended up with different configs for projects which now makes it a bit easy to maintain.
Next step, for us, would be to standardize everything and then try to make 1 workflow instead of 5 and so on...

Cheers,
Tobi

[Marlene Kegel - codefortynine]

Welcome to the community, @Walton David.

I am Marlene, product manager of Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards. 

If you're open to using a Marketplace app, Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards could be a helpful option. It's especially useful when working across multiple projects, as it lets you add a Quick Controller gadget to your dashboard that dynamically filters the other gadgets.

This allows you to filter by project (or other fields) with just a click, giving you both a cross-project overview and the ability to focus on individual projects easily.

You can read more about this use case in this community article.

If you’d like to try Quick Filters for Jira Dashboards out without installing anything, you can explore our demo dashboards.