Jira is one of the most popular project management tools in the market, used by teams across various industries. One of the key decisions teams have to make while setting up their project in Jira is choosing the right project type. Jira offers two types of project management options: team managed projects and company managed projects.
Choosing the right project type is critical to the team’s success, as both present advantages, limitations and considerations that are relevant to how your team operates.
For example, if a team chooses a team managed project when they have complex workflows or require detailed reporting, they will face challenges leading to inaccurate data driven decisions and a work process that hinders the team, instead of supporting it. Similarly, if a team chooses a company managed project for a small team with simple workflows, they will face challenges from the robustness and level of customization available in company managed projects, making it hard to set the project match their work process.
Also, to make things worse, if you choose the wrong type to begin with, changing the project type from one to the other is next to impossible (for more details see change project type from team managed to company managed)
With that, lets dive into what jira team managed projects and company managed projects are!
To note, the below jira project types comparison is made based on Jira software. Still, even though Atlassian offers many other products, the main pointers of this project comparison holds across the different product types.
Team Managed Projects
Definition and Overview of Team Managed Projects
Team managed projects in Jira are projects that can be managed by the team members, without requiring the involvement of a dedicated project manager or a jira administrator. Team managed projects offer teams greater flexibility managing their own flow.
With that, the projects are defined to fit only for the team creating them, and they are siloed. Anything created within a team managed project cant be shared with the rest of the system or with other teams (its possible to bring other teams into the same project, but this present a challenge in needing to manage work across multiple projects and boards).
For example, having several marketing teams on jira, each having their own team managed project, with a field of Marketing Channel, will result in multiple fields (as the number of projects) of Marketing channel, and any JQL will become that much more complex to work with.
The ability to customize a team managed project is more accessible, but its potential is less far reaching than the company managed projects, as team managed project currently allow less features available. For example, there are less options in customizing the workflow of the project.
The point of how easy it is to customize team managed project warrants a bit further discussion. If you have admins that are not in full control of the ways of Jira, it becomes very easy to mess up the project and its configuration. On the other hand, those changes are limited to project of the team alone, as they are siloed (this is a much greater risk when considering company managed projects).
Specific differences
- less advanced work flow capabilities
- No option to limit access to specific issues
- less support for addons and integrations from Jira market place
- bugs aren’t fixed as fast by Atlassian
- Less types of supported fields
- Not supported in advanced road maps
- Allows only for a single kanban board
- Can be created by any user (there is a configuration to control this)
Use Cases for Team Managed Projects
Team managed projects would fit very well for:
- Small teams that work on their own
- Teams with a simple work process ( where the capabilities of a company managed project isnt required)
- Teams with a need to adjust their own process on an ongoing basis
Company Managed Projects
Definition and Overview of Company Managed Projects
Compared to team managed projects, company managed projects offer much more flexibility, but not without some risk. Different from team managed projects, company shared projects allow for sharing information across projects, at the level of the tickets and the level of configuration. Company managed projects allow you to create a unified way of working across different teams and making a change to all of them in a flick of the fingers (or mouse clicks).
Also, being the incumbent type of projects with a greater history in Jira, they offer not only more features and 3rd party app support, but they will be the first to see new advancements in Jira and bug fixes.
With that, as they offer much more variance, and the option to affect multiple configurations at the same time, they are also restricted to be managed by designated system admins. For example, a project admin can add sprints, versions, component and update the board, but if cant change the screens, status of permissions to access the project.
Another major benefit for the company managed projects is the fact that these projects allow for multiple boards, which can easily support several teams working towards the same product/release.
Specific differences
- More advanced configurations to better support and facilitate teams’ work flow.
- Multiple boards (kanban, sprint based)
- Advanced roadmap support
- Full and main support of features (also 3rd party apps, bugs and new features)
- Support standardized work streams and a clear picture to upper management.
- Administration can only be done by product or site admins, which might cause for a bottleneck.
- Can be created by product or site admins only
Use Cases for Company Managed Projects
Company managed projects would fit very well for:
- A train of scrum teams working on the same product.
- Advanced and complex workflows.
- Needing to control issue level access
Best Practices
Team managed projects
- When using team managed projects, make sure to keep your team small, with simple jira process.
- Dont abuse the ability to make changes as this will confuse your team members.
- Use epics and tasks where needed. Having a small team doesn’t mean they wont benefit from a proper structure of information.
Company managed projects
- Tailor the jira process as much as possible but don’t make it to complex for the team to work in Jira.
- Also, don’t make advanced changes just for the sake of making changes.
- If using multiple boards, set in stone the field by which the boards are separated by. Future changes to this will come at cost.
- And above all else, any changes should be done by someone who knows the ins and outs of Jira very well.
So, which project type should you choose?
Its time to make the decision, company managed vs team managed jira!
To decide, think about your team in the context of the mentioned information. Is the team big or small? can you easily map their work in a team project? do you expect to share work with other teams? Do you need more advanced features by Jira? Are you willing to wait for the admin’s assistance to save the day when needed? These are all important questions to consider as they will dictate which Jira project type you should go with.
If there is still a doubt, go with Company managed, since you can use less features if needed. It would also be easier to extend the capabilities of a company managed project when needed, rather then to convert a team managed project to a company managed project.
And if there are still any questions, you can book a time for a call below.
