What is the best way to set up JIRA for my team?

[Rolondo Talbott]

We are new to the product and struggling with which way works best in Jira. We have small teams (sometimes just a single person) that work on multiple projects and operational work, within any given amount of time (or Sprints), and we want to track it all.

On the one hand, we can create a separate Project, for each of the Projects and Create Projects for operational work and create Sprints within those projects - but it might be hard to really understand all the work that is going on, across those projects, for each Sprint.

OR, we could great a single umbrella Project and use something like EPICs to delineate between the different projects and operational work. Sprints would then be planned with a myriad of items in each.

Given what JIRA can do, which way makes more sense?

[David Mayer · Accepted solution]

I would steer away from creating a JIRA project for every project in your organization, and create more "silos" of work based on the Epic with separate issue types. the team or user can be the assignee of the epic based on the component or type.  You should do some requirements gathering, draw out your ideal development/project workflow/lifecycle, and start basic. 

[Rolondo Talbott]

Just so that I am clear, are you suggesting that it would make more sense to create sort of an umbrella project for the team and then delineate project and operational work via epics, attaching those resource's names to the tasks/issues they are responsible for?

Assuming I have that correctly, in order to track an individuals progress i can filter on the epics but does this make reporting difficult?