How should we use the concept of Project in Jira Service Desk?

[Kaïs Albassir]

Dear Jira Service Desk users, administrators, experts, ...,

As a newbee, I have a structural question regarding the way we should use the concept of Project in Jira Service Desk.

The problem we are facing is the following : 
1 company divided in 3 main business units
This 1 company offers several software solutions
Some solutions are supported by all Business Units, others only by 1 BU
I am struggling on the way we should use Jira.

Right now, Jira Projects are being created each week (I nearly said : each day).  We have something like 30 Projects.  In each Project we have Incident Management, SR Mgt, Chg Mgt, ...

I come from a much more structured world (BMC Remedy, Omnitracker).  To me, this situation is total chaos.  In order to bring structure to this organization (what is being asked from me), I would be tempted to drastically reduce the number of Jira Projects.  But then how, how many, and most important why like this and not like that?

So I would be very curious to hear your experience.  Every information is welcome.
Should we go for 1 project for the whole company? 
1 project for each business unit?
1 project for each software solution that we propose?
1 project for each ITIL process?
and once again : why?

Thank you :-),

Kaïs.

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kaïs Albassir 

Let me give you some ideas.

• Each project has its own unique portal for the customers to raise tickets
• Each project can have different issue types which are further mapped to request types that are exposed on the portal. You can have multiple processes within same project
• As @Jack Brickey mentioned if you have totally different teams working on ticket then creating a separate project will work better
• Within a project you can have various organisations to group customers
• Project can have components, like various modules. This can be exposed on the portal for customers to select if they are familiar with your various modules
• Portal has a help centre which will display various projects so your customers can select which portal to raise ticket in, however most clients I worked with preferred minimum clicks from the customers to raise tickets so if you have multiple projects then it can be confusing for your customers to find out the right place to raise their requests.

I hope it helps, if you share bit more details then we can suggest more ideas.

Ravi

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

I would look to create a project by "product". If you have different teams working on a product you can create separate boards.

[Kaïs Albassir]

Thank you @Jack Brickey and @Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ , your answers help us a lot.

To give you more details : 

- there are different teams working on different software solutions, so this would plead for 1 project per team

- a lot of customers use several of our software solutions, so this would plead for 1 big project gathering these solutions

- sherry on the cake, some of the software solutions are sort of outdated, and new software solutions are being built.  We are in the process of building new software and migrating customers from the old to the new.  Obviously there is no 1 to 1 match between old and new (otherwise, it would not be funny).  Furthermore, this migration process is planned to take 5 years as the proposed solution are very, very large (migrating a customer takes typically 2 years).

At this stage, I think we should create new Service Desk projects for the new software solutions and leave the old ones for what they are.  What do you think?

I would also create 1 separate project for Internal IT, which seems a no-brainer, right?