Limitations as an Admin

Hi everyone...

Here's some food for thought for the weekend.
Let's create the scenario first.

I am the Atlassian Admin for my company. I've got some people backing me up, but i'm usually the main point of contact for our group.

This means you're often receiving questions, new challanges. But i feel i'm always tackling these in the same way, reusing previous work, or not quite finding the right answers that both work for them, and don't interfere with pre-existing setups.

In the long run, it feels like i'm being blocked by my own knowledge of the platform.
My Imagination fails as i'm immediatly translating ideas into schemes, custom fields & automation rules.

in meantime we hear about all these big and wonderfull companies that use Atlassian to their benefit. There's so much to learn from how they organize their spaces. How have they tackled growth and international distribution?

How have they tackled challange X or question Y.

Because i feel that for 80% most of us atlassian admins get the same questions from our user base.

Maybe what would be nice to break this chain is to host some inspiration sessions...
Bigger companies that are willing to show their environments, to show how they've tackled certain challenges. so we can get some fresh, new perspectives, and build some contacts too!

8 comments

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As an engineering student, I understand that feeling of being stuck when you get used to your own solutions. Breaking that inertia by seeing how others structure their systems (whether Atlassian schematics or circuits) is key to stopping repetition and starting to innovate. The inspiration sessions are a great initiative!

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Hi Kevin,

I’d be happy to share some thoughts on this.

While I obviously can’t show company-specific data, I do think there’s a lot of value in learning from each other’s real challenges and approaches. What might work well is a bi-weekly session where Atlassian admins can bring concrete problems, and we collectively brainstorm solutions—looking at patterns, trade-offs, and alternative ways of thinking rather than just configurations.

It could be a great way to step outside our own habits, challenge assumptions, and see how others tackle similar questions around growth, scale, and complexity.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this. If it resonates, let’s connect and get something small started, see how it goes, and open it up to others from there.

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Indeed, between the lines i read some kind of 'hackathon' approach.
Though doing that in high frequencies might get management complaining ;)

There'll be big challanges in company data protections (show without giving information), but also international cooperations, (different time zones etc.)

Though i hope Atlassian comunity admins will be able to pick this up and host some things for us ;)

What you're looking for is almost how I use the Atlassian Community most of the time - and I feel the same. Many times, I've told someone at my company not to get their hopes up for a thing they're asking for because of how X or Y or Z works.

About half of those times, I have poked around the community's past posts and questions, and realized I never even thought of A as a way to solve what they wanted, or I can use a workflow transition instead of an automation, or that I didn't need a marketplace app to get some kind of report...and then I get to go back and delight my users.

You would think I'd be used to it by now, but the variety of ingenious uses of the platforms never fails to amaze.

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Indeed, Often many responses received on the community are addon suppliers attemting to sell their products too, too often the solutions end up either raise the license type or get an addon which in both ways are often expensive...

I've been able to breach the walls of my own mind via the community too though, so the strength really is there.

It'd be great to get some collaboration sessions where we can share experiences, and maybe even have product teams available from atlassian or 3rt party addons!

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This is a great idea for Atlassian Community Events! Usually those are from third party providers (contractors who manage Atlassian, or provide training, or sell Marketplace apps) but so far all the ones I've attended focus on the natively available functions, and the ones that are done by Atlassians have been really valuable.

Though there's also no reason we in the community couldn't host something. HubSpot has HUGs (HubSpot User Groups) where people who are really active in that ecosystem host meetups, usually organized around some new feature or a common task. Anyone with a Zoom or GMeet or Teams license could host such a thing...

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Managing a Atlassian ecosystem is no small undertaking, especially when you’re balancing multiple sites and thousands of users. I won’t lie, it requires a massive breadth of knowledge ranging from the PM, SDLC and ITIL methodologies to technical scripting and being the go-to expert for every existing and new feature.

As our ecosystem has grown in both size and scope, our team hasn't always grown with it. I’ve found these 4 strategies were essential for staying ahead of the curve while keeping things manageable.

Scalable Governance

Standardize wherever you can. By using shared schemes and consistent field usage, you reduce technical debt. It’s also vital to establish guardrails, clear policies on how users request new spaces, configuration changes, or elevated permissions. This ensures the system grows by design rather than by accident.

User Knowledge Portal

Build a dedicated Confluence space to foster a self-serve culture. Include practical "how-to" guides, your internal policies, and even known "quirks" or limitations of the tools. Tools like Rovo are great aids to help users find answers themselves before reaching out for support.

Admin Automation

Invest time early on to save time later on. Focus on developing automation rules, Rovo agents, and scripts to handle routine or time-intensive tasks. We tend to build for our users but we are users ourselves. Even small automations can add up to dozens of hours saved over time which you can apply to other areas of your role.

Continuous Learning

The Atlassian landscape is wide, deep, and moves too fast to keep everything in your head. We focus on the immediate skills we need today, but stay connected to communities like this one to see what’s coming. I find it helpful to keep a personal Confluence space to save interesting articles, videos, solutions, and technical documentation, so they’re ready when I actually need to revisit and potentially implement them.

I know these are high level concepts but they have served us well over the years.

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HI Devlend!

You know this is exactly what i'm talking about!
Many people face the same challanges but are just at different stages overcomming them.
These are exactly the kind of things we're eager to learn about :)

thanks for sharing your insights!

I love it and agree with the discussion and comments. What I would also love to see is how these larger companies tackled various problems, out of the box vs buying another app scenario.

Where was it necessary to leverage an Add on, since Out of the Box solutions weren't available or didn't work.

From my own experience, part of the issues i see is culture. I feel that external process and procedures have limited the ability to come up with reasonable solutions or restriction on "can't afford another app" comments.

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"Can't afford another app" is a real problem because of the way pricing works, however, I think the bigger blocker may be not having a Jira developer on our team. Everything mentioned above that we do takes time, lots of time and it doesn't leave any time to focus on actual development. I think that job needs to be separate from Jira administration because that alone is a full time job.

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I think folks assume as the Jira Administrator, you are also the Admin and Developer and Architect. I have struggled with same issue(s). Would love to really dig into some development to make things easier or automated, but can't.

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I feel you, Shawn!

Every addons out there stems from some kind of shortcomming on the 'Vanila' product.
Ofcourse people will always find fancy needs or exotic expectations which Atlassian could never answer to. But it's always the same process

-> Get a question -> Can't answer it via vanila Jira -> Find an Addon -> pay more

Just wanted to put this out there: if you’re ever struggling with a complex implementation and want to brainstorm, feel free to ping me. I’m happy to jump on a call and help work through it. My schedule is a bit tight, but I’d love to find a time that works for us both. Reach me at: pragmatechy@gmail.com

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Hi Kevin, what you're asking is a bit complex.

I work as a consultant for an Atlassian partner, and that's precisely why we exist; we help companies adopt and adapt Atlassian solutions to their own ways of working. When large companies increase their Atlassian adoption, 90% of the time they seek the support of an Atlassian partner.

The flexibility of Atlassian solutions, in my experience, doesn't allow for a standard adoption method, but an Atlassian partner can help you with their expertise.

Keep in mind that each Atlassian partner has a team of consultants who work on different and varied scenarios, giving them the expertise to cover any requirement.

Hi Flavio!

I'm well aware... I'm not exacly looking to 'solve' this right here right now. But i thought it would be a very interesting food for discussion. Evidently so!

Next to that, even though many of the chalanges we're all facing as Atlassian Admins have quite a bit of overlap, even though the desired outcome might be different.
And even in those differences it's very interesting to learn how other companies have overcome certain challenges.

We too have our contracts via the Atlassian partners, and in my oppinion, they could play a vital role here, as they indeed have the means to overcome these kind of issues. Yet i'm sure that even these proffesionals encounter these same 'chains'