Team size to support Jira

Sree Divya Bonagiri

We have ~4000 users, ~120 workflows, on our Jira instance

We have custom bidirectional integrations to our internal tools. We need to maintain our jira infrastructure, jira upgrades, addon upgrades.

We have ~6 instances of Jira across our organisation and we are trying to move to our single instance in next 1 year.

Lot of teams in our organization are on-boarding to Jira now. We need to requirements gathering , analysis, setting them up, basic training for them.

Could some one suggest ideal team size to handle all these activities?

Brant Schroeder

We recently went through the same thing and is all I can say is it depends on the flexibility you provide the end user, teams, project admins, etc and the policies you have in place.  For example we require each department to use a standard methodology on projects.  The department can tweak the the core framework but it gives them a foundation to work from.  Most of them end up using the standard so additional issue types, custom fields, workflows, etc are limited to the more advanced departments and teams.  This also helps us have standard reporting and metrics across the organization.  We worked with leadership to develop standards and policies to enforce this to ensure that our Jira instance did not become unruly.  We are cleaning up our instances and consolidating still but we are doing it with two full-time administrators and two 1/4 administrators (Who work as back-up or additional support when things are busy).  We have lots of project administrators though and we hold training for them as part of the on-boarding process.  We also have a usergroup of around 200 people that are mainly project admins that meet monthly to address, discuss issues and help each other out.  We are in the process of setting up a governance committee that will help vet plugins and large impacting changes to ensure that these requests are centrally submitted and vetted by the larger community of users before coming to the admin group for review and approval.  We also have a test environment were project administrators can make and maintain complex workflows.  The workflows are then vetted and migrated to production.  there are other things we do to distribute the workload but a lot of it depends on policy, culture and needs.

For what you are describing I would recommend a little larger team that you can distribute the workload to.  I don't know how many requests you get a day or how long those requests take to resolve.  You could use Jira to track and help you better understand resource utilization that you can plan off of.   Once you migrate to a single instance the workload should drop.  I would also suggest setting up policies and processes that ensure a healthy Jira instance.  Those policies usually make it a lot more manageable and less staff is needed.