We have serveral project teams that have been using JIRA groups in a fashion that is starting to create administation problems. Each team has a group name by the project name (for example: "JIRA-teamx"). The group memebers are the team members (Dev, QA, PM). This group name is used to query issues that are not assigned to the team memebers. This way the team can find quickly which tickets in their project is assign to someone else outside the team. Now there are 72 groups in JIRA and noone know whichone is really used and active (many belong to old projects). Managing these groups has become an issue for the JIRA admin.
I rather get rid of this altogether if there is a way to allow the same funcationality to the teams but without creating groups (which is a JIRA admin capability). Is there such capability (like creating groups at the project level by project admin)?