How many people administer jira in your company?

[Tobias]

Hi guys, 

i would be interested to know how many people are responsible for the management and administration of jira in your company. It would also be interesting for me to know how the tasks are divided and how you organize yourselves. I would like to take the opportunity to possibly also see where we need optimization in the company. A rough indication of the number of people employed by the company would also be helpful.

So maybe something like "How we work"

I have only been responsible for jira in our company for a short time, so i find this exchange very interesting.

Thank you very much!

[Dave Liao]

@Tobias - love this question! 💜 Here are some of my thoughts, to prompt more discussion:

Context: I first started using Jira at a small company, where no one knew the product. Because of this, the admin role was shared between 3 teammates to split the work, especially if someone was on vacation.

As we learned with the product, 2 of us handled most admin tasks, and the third helped when we got overtasked.

Who to bring on! At the time, I was part of our company's project management team. Looking back, this made sense. I recommend an admin who's part of process/project management, and another admin who is responsible for IT services (think service desk, centralized IT, etc.).

Scaling up: At larger companies, the number of admins needed depends on how many requests/changes are vetted, and the request types being handled:

• I've seen entire service desk teams with global admin permissions
• I've seen business unit representatives (1-2 people) with global admin permissions
• Of course, for the above, everyone is educated on what is "safe" to change at a global level, and what should be communicated in advance.

Full-time or not? Certain companies may not have the budget to have a full-time Atlassian admin, even though they have the need. If Atlassian tools are core to the way your business operates, and you have many people who depend on you, hopefully some of your admins are dedicated to keeping your Jira running smoothly full-time.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

450 of us, several Jira instances, and about 12 people have admin across them, but with a LOT of people dipping in.  We actually have a core of 2-3 admins who look after the main one, and they are supposed to be the main admins on the others as well, but some teams have their own admin for their own Jira.

Then a load of others get dragged in when we're trying to do "clever" things - at one point, I found over 60 people had admin in one of the Jira systems.

I don't think we're a good model for this question though - most of our admins are highly experienced and/or trained Jira admins!  They won't let me have admin rights, they're scared I might "tidy up"...

However, our clients are probably better data for your question.  We encounter all-sorts - from the huge installations with only 1 (overloaded) admin, ones with small part-time or full-time teams of admins, ones with large part-time admins in a team or separate (I want to use the word "rogue" there), right the way through to huge "everyone is an admin" installs.

Typically though, we leave clients of any size with 3-10 admins joined up in a single team, and the team answers to a "stakeholder" group - mostly the Jira project owners.