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Comment by sangeeth96 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if there are folks here who work at for-profit orgs who use GitHub projects as their sole issue tracker for the entire org. How do you do it and what are the common pain points? Do you couple it with other issue trackers/project management tools like Jira? If so—why?

I still feel GH Projects is solely aimed at OSS or dev-centric or dev-only orgs and doesn't cater to teams with non-devs, which is how I think most orgs function. I'm not sure if it'll ever try to be something more than that but I really wish it did.

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We did at my previous employer (https://www.ourbranch.com/) in our data org. I can't totally remember, I'm pretty sure the engineering org did, too. It definitely is lacking in some of the advanced features you get with a Jira, but it was fine. I was surprised by how powerful GitHub Projects is. We also built out extra reporting for it in our data warehouse, using Fivetran for ELT.

Oh cool! I have some questions:

1. Does the data org work in isolation from other orgs? I'm guessing not.

2. Does the data org consist of non-engineers? If yes, are they also onboarded into GitHub with their own GH accounts?

3. If (1) is no, what tool is used to track cross-org work? Does the company also use Jira or some other tool and is GH projects integrated with them or something? I'm really curious about this workflow if it is relevant to how you folks work.

1. No -- the project boards and issue tracker were visible to the whole company, which was helpful for being able to show people what we were doing and where their requests were scheduled. Our points of contact within departments we supported worked particularly closely with my team to co-manage the projects.

2. Most of the ICs didn't have an engineering background, and came from a more traditional data analyst background. When I arrived, the only thing actually version controlled in Git was LookML that wasn't actually used. Many learned Git and GitHub for the first time there.

We ditched Jira to go all-in on GH. It's nice having the project management in the same place as where the actual work happens. It's not perfect, but it's better than GH + Jira.

Probably the benefit I'm most happy with are that people are writing more, and in greater detail. I don't know why that is. For some reason, the GH experience just encourages writing, whereas the Jira experience seems hostile to it.

Interesting. Are you an all-dev org or did you also onboard non-devs into GH Projects?

> the GH experience just encourages writing, whereas the Jira experience seems hostile to it.

Huh, that's interesting to hear. I didn't personally find it harder to add detailed descriptions in Jira back when I used it couple of years back. Wonder if there's anything specific about the experience you can describe that makes you feel GH projects is more friendly for writing.

Roughly half the company are programmers, so we have non-devs working with GH Projects and collaborating on issues.

Colleagues who aren't developers have become more engaged in the process of writing bug reports or giving feedback on product development (or at least, the parts of it that concern them). Some of the non-programmers have admitted that they are surprised by how much they enjoy using GitHub.

That's really nice to hear. I'm glad things worked out for your org.

GitHub marketing folks probably should reach out to you :)

Nice job!

We were interested in Issues and Projects, but the number of people at an organization who need access to those but not to code or CI is pretty large. GitHub does not have a different license option for BA/CX/PM types. We ended up going with Jira for tasking, which was substantially cheaper.

I was sad about this because issues/projects had all the stuff I personally cared about, and there was no need to work to set up integrations. I think there was some anxiety by the PMO that it wasn't mature enough for what they wanted, but I don't remember any specifics. Probably something about reporting.

That's how I feel as feel. It's costly given the things non-devs types won't need and it's not fleshed out enough to attract those types of folks to make the switch. GitHub is probably missing the boat tbh. Even the marketing page (https://github.com/features/issues) is targeted at developers.

We do at Grafana - it's mostly all public so you can go look at the mess of trying to run jira boards for however many teams out of one repo https://github.com/orgs/grafana/projects. It's a mixed bag, but Github's been building out Issues and Projects a lot in the last few years that's really improved things.

We do. We're an agency so there's probably 60 odd repos on GitHub each with a project attached, a lot of non-tech people (even clients) using the issues and boards. Nobody has complained, though every now and then I've looked around for something else, but for me the number one priority is that the code and issues are in perfect sync with each other - much harder with a 3rd party tracker.

It would be a tough sell for my org to triple our license spend on GHEC just so we can teach a bunch of folks new software.

Absolutely. They definitely can't expect to sell this to teams/orgs with non-devs without introducing separate pricing for folks who just want to read/write to projects but maybe read-only for some aspects of a repo.

A FOSS plugin to mimic Service Desk on top of Github issues would be great.

You'd miss the infinite complexity of Jira workflow configuration, but that might be a good thing.

Not FOSS, but this is kind of what Zenhub was/is, right?

> I'm curious if there are folks here who work at for-profit orgs who use GitHub projects as their sole issue tracker for the entire org.

Yes, I'm an advisor for such a company. They are using Github Projects/Issues for all their internal development.

Their customer support uses a different ticketing system, though. Mostly because they need to interact with external users.

We tried (dev-centric org) but the non-technical users weren’t able to use it well / didn’t like it - so now we don’t have issue tracking at all for non technical stuff -.-

Oh my! That doesn't sound like a good place to be in. I hope y'all figure something out to get them onboard or migrate out.

We mostly use notion and google workspace for the non-technical stuff now and as far as I can tell both are pretty good.

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