Ever lost admin access to a Team Managed project?

[#1]

As a Jira Admin, did you ever lose access to a Team Managed project with no way to know?

Team Managed projects have their own permission model that sits outside the usual admin hierarchy. If a project is private — whether it was created that way or a project admin changed it later — even Org Admins and Jira Admins lose access to its settings unless they're explicitly added to a project role.

That's why it's good practice stop using TM projects to always keep your admin or Jira support group in the Administrator role across all Team Managed projects. The problem is that any project admin can remove it at any time and you won't know until something breaks.

That alone is easy to miss. You only find out when something breaks or someone reports it, and the only workaround is manually editing the URL to reach project settings.

I ran into this repeatedly and first solved it with a Jira Automation rule that queries the API to surface affected projects (happy to share that approach if anyone's interested)

But as I wanted something more accessible, I built a Forge app for it. And it's free.

You select any Jira group (e.g. jira-administrators) and instantly see which private Team Managed projects are missing it as Administrator. You can add the group back directly from the app. No URL hacking, no manual checks.

Remember: It's free, requires no external setup, and runs entirely within your Atlassian site.

Would love feedback from the community, especially from Jira admins who've hit this gap before.

🔗 Team Managed Audit

[Markus]

Hi,
we have a couple Team-managed Spaces that are set to private with no admin groups. But as a Jira Admin you can always add yourself to the Space.
You go to the Jira Admin Setting and select the Spaces sub menu. There you will find a List of all Spaces in your Instance. Locate the Space you need access to and click on the three ellipses (more Actions) on the right hand side. Then you can access the Space Settings and add yourself or the required group as whatever role you need.

Hope this helps.