Single team does BAU and project work - one Jira project or two?

[Melanie Albrecht]

My team of 10 people uses a Service Desk project to take incoming requests from other teams within our company. This works pretty well for us. We like the SLA functionality, and the pretty forms for customers to fill in.

More recently we've been taking on project work as well. Each project takes 5 - 20 person-days, and we use one epic per project.

I'm trying to work out whether to use a separate Jira project for the project work, or to keep putting it all in the same SD project.

The opinions I've found advise using separate Jira projects when you have one team that handles BAU and another that handles project work. Because we are a single team that handles both kinds of work, this advice isn't that helpful for us.

What do you think?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Actually, I would not look at the teams to answer the "one project or two".

Look at the processes you want each issue type to follow

I'm looking at the simple case here - you've broadly got two types of issues - BAU or SD work, and Project (or development?) work. 

Do the same processes work for all the issue types?  Do you have a need to use the same versions and components for both types of work?  Same permissions, notifications, fields and so-on.  Even applications might matter here.

I suspect the answer is a simple "no" in your case, because you've said you're using SD for some work and not for others.  If you were to do this in a single project, you'd have to put all your "dev" work into a project intended to do support and pay a fortune to make all your developers into Agents so they can use the project in full.

I strongly recommend using the SD project for support, and having one, or even severa, projects for development work.

Then make an equivalence that "Board = team", not "project = team".  A board can include issues from many different places, so when you've got one team who need to work in several projects, that's fine, just include the issues they need to work with.

[Melanie Albrecht]

Thanks, Nic. I love your carefully considered answers - I always get a fresh perspective.

Is your strong recommendation about using separate project mostly to do with cost?

My whole team (we are all technical writers) already has SD licenses, because we all do BAU work and need the SD functionality.

The BAU and project work are in the same systems and for the same client teams, so the components are the same. We use the same (fairly simple) workflow for both work types.

The differences are:

• We don't use releases for the BAU work.
• We don't use epics for the BAU work.
• We don't use sprints for BAU work but we are considering whether to use sprints for project work.

I'm still on the fence. What do you think?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I try to ignore money most of the time, but I can't do my job without "commercial awareness" and I have thought about it here.

>Is your strong recommendation about using separate project mostly to do with cost?

No.  It's about organising your people into the teams that get stuff fixed for your clients

>My whole team (we are all technical writers) already has SD licenses, because we all do BAU work and need the SD functionality.

That's fine, but I would question the need for SD for everyone.