Creating a Jira Project
Creating a Jira ProjectOverview
A Jira Project is your team or department’s workspace at the group level. For example, the HR Benefits Team might create a Jira Project to track all of their work and simply call it “HR Benefits”.
Jira Project = Team or Department Workspace
- Jira Project = "Enterprise Applications" (Workspace)
- Jira Project = "HR Benefits" (Workspace)
- Jira Project = "Event Professionals Team" (Workspace)
Within each Jira Project, work is typically organized under what are called “Initiatives”. A Jira Initiative is what you might be accustomed to calling a project in the real world – a business goal, research initiative, event, etc.. Within each Initiative, things are further broken down into milestones, tasks, a timeline, stakeholders, etc.
Most users will not create their own Jira projects. Instead, they will work within a Jira project already created by their department heads or team leads, and they will track their work as initiatives, epics, etc.. Click here to jump to the “Preparing Your Initiative” page.
Let’s look at an example team - Event Professionals. They might create a Jira Project “Event Professionals” as the workspace where the team organizes all its work. A Jira Initiative, which is what we would think of as a project in the real world, for Event Professionals might be a wedding or a barbeque. All of a team’s initiatives are contained within their project workspace.
There are two types of projects (workspaces) in Jira - team-managed or company-managed. While both project types have the same basic functionality, such as the ability to create issues and view a Kanban board, company-managed projects are more feature-rich and are more commonly used at Tufts.
Note: In general, unless there is a strong use case, team-managed projects are not commonly used at Tufts.
|
Company-managed projects (common) |
Team-managed projects (not common) |
|
| Functionality | All Jira features | Limited to the simplest features. E.g. Can only create basic roadmaps; cannot pull from other projects; cannot create custom filters |
| Permissions | Fine-grain; can set unique permissions for each individual issue within the project | One set of permissions applied across entire project: a project and all contained issues can either be private to only the project’s team members or viewable by anyone at Tufts. |
| Recommended? | Yes | No |
| Creation | Must be created by TTS Jira Administrators | Can be created by any user, including non-admins |
To see a detailed breakdown of company-managed projects versus team-managed projects, click here.
Note: Previously, “Company-Managed” projects were called “Classic” projects.
To request a new company-managed project, email tuftswork-support@elist.tufts.edu with:
- The name of the project (e.g. “Event Professionals”)
- Team members whom you’d like to be initially added. As the project owner, you can always add new team members at any point.
If your request is approved, Jira admins at Tufts will create the new project, enroll the requested team members, and then follow up with you with a link to your new project.
Note: Previously, “Team-Managed” projects were called “Next-Gen” projects. Learn more about getting started with your team-managed project here.
- At the top of the Jira page, click Projects.
- A dropdown menu appears, listing all projects you have access to. At the bottom, click Create Project.
- Under Project Templates, be sure Software Development is selected, then click Kanban.
- In the top right of the info panel, click Use Template.
- At the bottom of the Team-managed column, click Select a team-managed project.
- Give your project a meaningful Name. (Note: The Key will be automatically generated using the name’s initials.)
- Choose the Access Level of your project. This will apply to all parts of your project, including all issues.
- Click Create in the bottom left.
- You’re finished! You’ll be brought to your project’s Kanban board.