How to best manage multiple projects in JIRA for a non-development team?

Question

I am looking to find some resources or best practices on how to use JIRA to manage the Business As Usual (BAU) and other projects for my team.

We have several major projects we are working on, and each project has several key components that various team members work on in parallel.

In addition, we have our BAU tasks as well.

Are there recommended workflows/plugins to help manage this? My initial thought:

Option 1:

Each project the team works on becomes a component

Option 2:

Each project is an Epic Each subproject is a story under the epic

Answer 1

Have every project be part of its own Project, but have a single shared board to visualize all tasks. A board is simply a visualization of a JQL (JIRA Query Language) filter, after all.

In this way, whenever you create a story/task/etc., it will be assigned to one specific project. However, when you want to visualize and prioritize all work, it's all in a single, shared location. If you want, you can still have individual boards for each Project (as, in a typical situation, any given developer should only be working on a single project at a time), but you'll still want a shared board for prioritization purposes.