How Many Jira Groups is Too Many? I have 60 with 150 users

[Steve Nienaber]

I have 150 Jira Users and 60 Groups.  Atlassian training indicates that more groups equates to more complexity and overhead to manage.  Please offer your opinion/insight.  

I'm diving in to this as I'm preparing to take the ACP-120 Cert and want to understand my own Jira Instance first.  

[John Funk]

Hi Steve,

With that few number of users, why in the world would you have that many groups? That is way overkill. What are you doing with the groups? 

[Steve Nienaber]

Thank you!  Just needed to hear that from someone not at my company.  This is the issue of having 14 Org admins, of which I am one.  Now I'm on the hunt for who set these up!  Thank you!

[John Funk]

You need to discuss with leadership and get rid of 90% of those org admins. You only need a handful - probably no more than 3 for that number of users. You need at least 2 in case something happens to one of them. 

And you should handle permissions using Project Roles (Space Roles) and not groups if that's how they are being used. 

[Steve Nienaber]

Is there a place in Jira where I can see who set up those Groups and how they are being used?

[John Funk]

As far as the setup - go to Settings > System > Audit log

Then search on "group" or the group name. 

For where they are used, go to the Groups menu option on the User Management settings. Then click the information icon next to App. It will tell you which Atlassian product uses it but not much else. 

You should look under each Permission scheme and search for the group name to see if it is in there. Hopefully, you don't have a ton of Permission Schemes. If you do, that is another problem.