Due to small team size, should we merge different projects into 1 (based on business ask)

[Amit Bansal]

We were running 3 different projects but in new team structure, we have small teams (3-5) across all and now business is asking to merge all projects into 1. 

While fundamentally I am not aligned to merge projects, can you pls. share advantage and challenges in this approach?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

That's not a decision we can make for you, nor one that should be based on the software you are using!

Does it make sense to merge the teams?  If they are all in one team, will that still be managable (Scrum for example recommends 4-7 people in a team, and I know most team leads struggle when they've got 9 or more in their team).  The team should really be determined by the work they are going to get - it's fine to merge teams when all your team members can work on the same things, but there is little point in merging two teams when half can only do some work, and the other half another type of work - the two groups have no reason to work together or on the same things.

[Amit Bansal]

Nic - Question is about merging Jira projects rather team merging. Business is asking to move open items from 3 projects to single project even though all those 3 projects are for different application.

Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Amit, not quite, the question was about both team and projects, and you can't really answer the project part of the question without asking about the team.

It's actually not that relevant to the question, your teams could be working from boards and filters that include things from many projects.

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @Amit Bansal ,

Welcome to the Community! Yeah, it's really the business or the team decision which approach to take. The advantages of having separate projects is that you could have dedicated workflows and components, e.g. You could also manage permissions at the project level by defining roles and assigning the right people for each project. The advantage of one project only is that you get to configure and maintain only one project.

[Amit Bansal]

Thanks Carlos

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

You're welcome! :-)

[Amit Bansal]

Jehan - Question is about merging Jira projects rather team merging. Business is asking to move open items from 3 projects to single project even though all those 3 projects are for different applications.

Monitoring and tracking is expected to happen in the same project. Just that title of each story/task would have name of application in it.

We have raised the concern that merging them would mean lot of context will remain in the 2 projects that would only have closed items and would affect team's ability to refer to them in newer stories.

Thanks

[Jehan Bhathena]

Hi @Amit Bansal ,

perhaps you can share a little more insight into the use case, what does each project achieve? Do they all support the same product? Are the team members shared in the projects? Post merge how do you plan to monitor and track the each status?

[Jehan Bhathena]

Hi @Amit Bansal ,

Thanks for the insights. I'll try to answer your points from my perspective:

"Monitoring and tracking is expected to happen in the same project" : Since this is their end goal I can think of a few ways this can be done without merging the projects. Maybe you've already thought of this but still adding it here too.

1. Use Dashboards

2. Use a Scrum board and customize the filter to show tickets from all projects instead of 1

"Just that title of each story/task would have name of application in it": This approach almost never works, you're prone to Human errors and the " business team" Might come back to you asking to solve this too. Would suggest Components and perhaps a custom fields to denote the product.

Pros of 1 project:

1. Single source of truth

2. Easy management

3. Lesser Admin overhead

Cons :

1. Multiple products have different requirements, most cannot be customized in 1 project alone

2. Human error of reporting will cause your stats to be confusing in terms of which product is working better

IMO if the business team has pushed this change as an "Order" Then would recommend making it amd getting it over with, will make your life much easier 🙂

Hope this helps.