We're a 10 person tech department supporting 4 other departments. We've been evaluating Jira as part of a move to a more Agile development environment.
For the most part, Jira has been quick to learn and largely matches our needs, but my lack of experience in using it leaves me with one unanswered configuration question.
Initially, I have created a single project so everyone in the Tech department could work from the same backlog and sprint schedule. I added a custom field so that issues could be assigned to the Department/Product Owner responsible for reviewing and prioritizing them. Each owner has their own board in the project to see only their issues for prioritizing and scheduling into sprints. It should be noted that while we have a few ongoing "products", much of our work consists of upgrades to department processes. As such, our product owners are really the department managers.
This Jira configuration seems to work fine, but I'm wondering if I'm missing something that will bite me later. The alternative I'm considering is to create separate projects for each department so they would have their own backlogs and schedules at a project -- not a board -- level. This would make things easier for the Product Owners, but require us to jump between projects in Jira to see what we should be working on. We are not organized such that tech members only work for one department. I also suspect it will complicate sprint planning.
A few of our epics might span departments, but most do not. If a story or task happened to span departments, we would divide it.
Are there reasons why one approach might be better than the other? Security? Reports? Summarizing work to be done? Is there another option I haven't considered?
Hope this is reasonably clear. Thanks in advance for your input.
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