What is a more suitable way to set up our project?

[Linn]

Hi Jira Community,

I am new in Jira, and now my company is thinking of using Jira to track and manage our resources and tasks. However, after multiple days of googling and youtube watching, I still don't see an obvious way to set up our tasks.

Here is some background about us: We are a small company, we have several lines of product (boat engines), and each line has different products.

They all share similar tasks between and within product line like software dev, hardware dev, testing, purchasing, manual writing etc... and often just small changes from each other.

My thought is to

• have projects represents each line
• boards to represent each group which will be shared between projects ( same person for similar task)
• Using advance roadmap to control over all project timeline and resource blocking between product line

However, I am not sure how to control each product release within a product line. (maybe component?)

Will this be a reasonable approach? 

[caglad · Accepted solution]

Agree with @elizabeth_jones  create a project for each product in your product line.

Then use the same workflow, same fields (and same order on the screen). I would use dashboards for each user to view their to-do's (created from filters). while you can use the boards to visualize the work, you can also create management dashboards too.

[elizabeth_jones · Accepted solution]

I would recommend having one project per product line. Then use the same workflow for all projects. Finally have 1 board per project and 1 cross-functional board that uses a jql query to visualize the work. As you scale this will allow you to continue using jira in the same way and differentiate as needed. Let me know if you have any questions about this approach. 

[Linn]

Thank you for the reply Elizabeth. This is very helpful for me.

So what you mean is having one produce line (lets say A series here) per project and having a board dedicate to A series and have 1 board that is shared between all series (A series, B series, etc) and use component to separate the the topics like software dev, hardware dev, manual etc)

And how can I distinguish  products with in a series, like A-1 and A-2? 

I was also thinking about if we use each product per function (software dev, hardware dev, manual etc) and use board for each product. That way, will the team members have a better view of what they needs to be done for them. 

[Daniel Ebers]

For further distinguishing between products a custom field might come in handy. Although you could do this with components also - they are already planned in for a different use case if I got everything right (to separate the topics).