Our company is growing quickly and we keep launching new projects almost monthly. Each project needs tons of user stories, tasks, epics, and specialized workflows configured.
Currently we either duplicate old projects by hand or copy issues in batches. This approach is really problematic though. Parent-child relationships get messed up, issue connections fail, and we waste hours cleaning up everything after deployment.
I know there must be a better approach for handling project templates in Jira. What methods are working well for your teams?
Been through this exact scenario during our rapid expansion. Creating a standardized project structure document first really helped, then we used Jira’s REST API to automate the bulk creation process. We wrote a simple script that handles parent-child relationships properly and keeps all issue links intact during setup. The key was mapping out our epic and story hierarchies beforehand so the script could recreate them accurately. Took our developer about two days to build, but now we can spin up a fully configured project in under 30 minutes with zero broken relationships. The API approach gives you way more control than templates or third-party tools, especially with complex linking requirements.
the built-in templates are ok, but we switched to marketplace apps like project configurator. it makes cloning much smoother and fixes those linking issues you’re dealing with. takes about 10 minutes to set up a new project instead of hours of manual cleanup. it’s a bit expensive but totally worth it when you’re scaling quickly.
We hit the same wall scaling from 5 to 50 projects in a year. What saved us was using Jira’s project templates in the admin panel instead of copying projects manually. Set up a master template with your standard workflows, issue types, and field configs, then use it as a blueprint. This keeps everything intact - copy-paste always breaks something. Also worth setting up automation rules to create your standard epics and initial tasks automatically when you spin up a new project. Yeah, it’s work upfront, but we’re saving 4-6 hours per project now and those relationship mapping errors are gone.