Set up a Jira project for a marketing team
10 min
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:
- Change the background for your project
- Configure work types, workflows, boards, and users based on your specific needs as a marketing team
Meet our example teams
Team-managed business projects in Jira are very flexible. You don’t need to change your team’s processes to match Jira. Instead, project admins can configure team-managed business projects to support the way your team already works. Let’s explore some of the ways that marketing teams can configure Jira to meet their needs by following two teams: an events marketing team and a demand generation team.
Our events marketing team plans dozens of events a year, from small round tables to conferences with thousands of people. They need a flexible tool that can track a lot of information and contributors.
Our demand generation team has to plan and track numerous campaigns, communicate timelines and results to stakeholders, and collaborate with many teams. They need a robust tool that can consolidate a lot of information and projects.
Both teams will use a team-managed business project, but many of the same configurations are available in company-managed projects.
Brand your project
Configuring your project’s appearance will help it stand out from other projects and help your team feel connected to it. Project admins can customize the project background.
To change the background for your project:
- Open your project.
- Next to the project name, select More actions (represented by ···), then Set project background.
- Choose a background from the options or upload your own image.
👇You can set the background for your project to an image from a library, a gradient, a solid color, or a custom image.
Customize your work types
One of the easiest ways to customize your project is to create specific work types named for the kinds of work you do. You can also just use the default work types in a unique way to meet your team’s needs. We recommend starting simple and seeing what customizations would be helpful as you start working in your project.
👇Click the tabs below to explore two examples of how to customize work types.
The events marketing team discussed the most useful way to organize their work. They decided to use these default work types:
- Use epics to group together work items for major workstreams at large events.
👉 For example: Breakout sessions, keynote address, training sessions - Use tasks to represent a small piece of work that needs to get done.
👉 For example: Confirm keynote speaker, vet a caterer, tour a venue
They also created three custom work types to represent their specific needs. These work types are at the same level as tasks and are grouped together under epics:
- A deliverable is a tangible asset.
👉 For example: An email, blog, or other public communication - A major milestone is a key moment that the team reports to stakeholders.
👉 For example: The date when event registration is live - A meeting is a cross-functional meeting the team needs to prepare for.
👉 For example: The vendor budget review meeting
👇Here’s the hierarchy of the work types in the events marketing team’s project.
The team decided to keep their fields simple, highlighting the Summary, Description, Due Date, and Assignee fields.
Configure your workflows and boards
Your workflow and your board should represent the process that your team’s work moves through from start to finish. Workflows are very customizable, so there’s a lot you can do to support your team’s rhythm.
👇Click the tabs below to explore two examples of how to customize workflows and boards.
The events marketing team wanted to be able to get quick status updates on work items from looking at their board. They kept their workflow simple with these statuses: To Do, In Progress, In Review, Blocked, Canceled, and Done. They used the same workflow for all work types.
👇This is the workflow for the events marketing project.
👇This is the board for the events marketing project.
Set up your users and roles
The last key component of getting your project up and running is granting permission to users. You can create custom roles and grant them specific permissions based on your team’s collaboration and privacy needs. You can use these roles alongside or instead of the default roles.
👇Click the tabs below to explore two examples of how to customize user roles.
The events marketing team evaluated what kinds of people interact with their work and how they do so. They decided to use both default roles and custom roles to meet their needs.
- Administrator: Their people manager
- Member: Event leaders and workstream leaders
- Contributor (custom role): Everyone on their team who would work on events and workstreams but wouldn’t be responsible for them. This role has all editing, updating, and collaborating permissions for work items, but doesn’t have the ability to create or delete work items.
- Viewer: All stakeholders