How can I give a user administrative rights to a single project within JIRA?

Question

Our company has far too many JIRA full administrators, and this has been the source of lots of problems in the past (particularly with shared schemes, permissions, etc.).  I've long been interested in a way to give my users rights to do higher level administrative tasks within certain projects that they are responsible for without giving them full administrative rights to the JIRA administrators group.  In the past I have saved time by doing this with heavy warnings to them, but I'm hoping there is a better way.

I'm pretty well versed with setting permissions for projects as I do it regularly, but how could I expose the right to a user to do things like renaming fields without giving them full administrative control?  In my mind it's impossible, but only because I haven't found a way to do it myself in the past.

As you can tell, I really want to contain any harm they might cause from a mistake to their own project, and not cascade to all JIRA projects.  Often I help them with these tasks myself, but I believe in empowering our users where it makes sense.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks!

AudienceScience.com · Answer

Thanks a lot Nic, I appreciate your taking the time to answer my question.

I guess my suspicions were correct all along, but wanted to ensure I wasn't missing something as I've definitely been guilty of doing that in the past too.  With Atlassian products, I've come to learn that there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same thing and my hope was that this was one of those paths.

I think I'll try to limit the damage by helping out more for the administrative tasks myself as I'm the guy that everyone comes running to when things break anyway.  Take care.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

You can't do it.  The example you give is one of the reasons why - if a project admin renames a field, they rename it for everyone, not just their project.  That's why you need to limit administration to a handful of people who understand the impact of what they are doing (Standard recommendation - your admin team should be 2-10 people, never more)

There are some workarounds as addons, rather a nifty "project creator" thing from Wittified, and a couple of "fields who's lists can be maintained by project admins", but no way to devolve it like that (especially when it's global like a field name)