Azure boards: new project vs new team within a project - what are the trade offs?

Question

I am about to start a project for which we will use Azure Boards to track progress of our work items in Kanban-style. Would like to ask a high level question as I am a beginner in Azure boards and have to make a decision on how to set up 11 Kanban boards.

We have decided it makes sense to have 11 boards, one for each category of product in our company. A few pointers:

• There will be a single team working through the work items in the eleven boards
• There will be moments where the team will be working simultaneously with more than one board
• The eleven boards should contain the same team members / columns, as the workflow is exactly the same across those 11 boards

My question: should we create 11 different projects OR 11 teams within a project to get our eleven boards? What kind of rationale would make me want to create different projects as opposed to different teams?

Thank you

Answer 1

When to add another project

In general, we recommend that you use a single project to support your organization or enterprise. A single project minimizes the maintenance of administrative tasks and supports the most optimized / full-flexibility cross-link object experience.

Even if you have many teams working on hundreds of different applications and software projects, you can most easily manage them within a single project. A project serves to isolate data stored within it. You can't easily move data from one project to another. When you move data from one project to another, you typically lose the history associated with that data.

Reasons to add another project:

You may want to add another project in following instances:

• To prohibit or manage access to the information contained within a project to select groups
• To support custom work tracking processes for specific business units within your organization
• To support entirely separate business units that have their own administrative policies and administrators
• To support testing customization activities or adding extensions before rolling out changes to the working project
• To support an Open Source Software (OSS) project

If the above conditions are not met, we generally recommend that you create multiple teams in a project. Here is the official document you can refer to.