What is best way to track maintenance projects?

[jamie royce]

I am a new project manager in a software company that has a few dozen clients that require monthly maintenance. Each is its own job with separate process taking anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. They should have due dates, work estimates and priorities. 

What is the best way to set up Jira for this type of work? I tried making one overall project called "Maintenance" and adding each client as a task, but this didn't seem right. I also tried making each client their own project. 

Please let me know any suggestions.

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello @jamie royce

Thank you for reaching out.

The best solution to achieve your need will depend if your clients must have interactions with the team directly on the issues (Help Desk) or if these interactions would be done by a different channel, so Jira would only be used for internal management with no client interactions.

If you need interactions between your team and the clients to be done and registered directly on the issues (Through a support portal or e-mail), I would suggest you to use the Jira Service desk application to achieve your need:

Jira Service Desk | IT HelpDesk 

This app is billed based on the number of Agents (The members of your team that will be working on the issues) and provide an external customer portal together with an e-mail channel where your customers will be able to interact directly with the team responsible for their maintenance tasks, getting real-time notifications when any update is done.

Now, if you just need a system to manage the work done internally and no interactions with the customer should be done directly in Jira, you can use the Jira software application.

About these sentences:

They should have due dates, work estimates and priorities. 

Both Jira Service desk and Software application provide due dates, work estimates, and priorities. You can check these links to know how you can configure it.

What is the best way to set up Jira for this type of work? I tried making one overall project called "Maintenance" and adding each client as a task, but this didn't seem right. I also tried making each client their own project. 

Per your description, I understand you will have different workflow steps and time to accomplish each of the maintenance requests from your clients. 

Based on the information you provided so far, that's how I would configure your Jira Application:

1. Create multiple issue-types to match the workflow steps and specifications of each of the customer requests. e.g.: Hardware repair, Hardware replacement, Internet repair, etc.
2. Each maintenance request from your client would be an issue/task, where you would be able to select due dates, work estimates, and priorities to properly manage your teamwork.
3. To properly differentiate from which client the maintenance requests are coming from, I would follow one of the suggestions below:
   1. Create a different project for each client. This way, you could better separate the work related to each client and manage the view permission of your team members, in case you will have teams dedicated to specific clients that should not access information from others.
   2. Use Components to properly differentiate each client's issues, all with the same project. This will keep your issues more integrated and easier to interact with each other.

Let us know if you have any questions.

[jamie royce]

Thank you so much for this very helpful answer! 

[Petter Gonçalves]

You are welcome @jamie royce

Let us know if you need further instructions about the suggestions provided.