What levels of administrative clearance are there?

Question

Hi there (:

I was recently appointed the highest possible admin position in Jira within our company.

I'm in charge of managing all the administrative details and making sure everything works the way it should. Last week however I was out sick and an rather imminent issue came up that led to further complications. Said incident now has my supervisor pushing for more employees to receive the administrative rights I have, to prevent similar situations in the future, but the higher ups are feeling a little uneasy about distributing that kind of clearance randomly. In order to try and find a compromise both parties might agree with, I'm looking to find out what levels of admin positions there are, to see if maybe there is a position that would allow appointed employees to apply simple modifications to our settings, but that doesn't give them access to everything.

I tried doing some research on the topic using the information provided on the site, but I can't seem to quite find what I'm looking for. I've had very positive experiences with the question board so far, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm grateful for any kind of information on the topic (:

Respectfully,

JO

Evgenii · Accepted Answer

Hi, @Janaina Oezcan

The basic level is Project Administrator — with this role, the user can manage project settings but won't be able to change shared elements like screens, workflows, permissions, and so on. They also can't create new fields, issue types, or schemes.

To do all of the above, the user will need Product Administrator rights. But with this level of access, they’ll have full control over Jira and be able to make changes across the entire system.
Here is Atlassian manual about administration levels:
https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/what-are-the-different-types-of-admin-roles/

Staffan Redelius · Accepted Answer

Hi Janina

The highest level is Organization Admin and with that you can do everything in Jira including creating groups, manage users, change billing and adding new apps. You should keep this kind of power to a very small group of trusted individuals.

As a Jira-administrator you can change shared schemes for company managed projects and that might be what your colleagues feels they need to do. The challenge is that they need to be aware of the effect of the changes. I worked in a organization with 800 users and 46 jira-admins with very little knowledge of the platform. That was very challenging to say the least, things changed and broke on a daily basis.

If the schemes in a company managed project are not shared with other projects the Project-admin can have the privilege to change workflows and screens for their own project. Even if they are in a company managed project.

Team managed projects gives even more flexibility to the users themselves.

So it all boils down to what they need to change. Start by listing those things to get a clearer picture. After that it is easier to suggest a proper plan of action

Best regards,
/Staffan