🏆 A day in the life of a Jira admin contest

[Bridget]

Wow I am cracking up at these! I'll announce a winner on May 1st! But you are all winners in my eyes 😂

[Linda Milne_Togetha Group_]

Response: Oh, wow, you can do that?

[Fadoua]

There are 2 scenarios in handling my users requests as an Atlassian Admin in my daily activities. I either:

1. Provide an answer right away because it is a question I answered so many times or read about it on a post or email from Atlassian
2. Ask the user to give me some time so I can browse through Atlassian documentation, Community or reach out directly to my fellow leaders.

The scenario I am dealing with a lot is to convince a user that the feature they are talking about is available at the time being in Jira/Confluence cloud. We are Datacenter users we don't have it yet or we may not have it at all. After what seems to me a win situation. I get: what do you mean Jira could, we are in cloud too, our instances are in AWS Cloud 😳🥺

[Alex Gay]

The day starts with the (virtual) standup who is taking always longer as it should.

As we are a team that supports multiple applications, we (my colleague and I are only working on the  Atlassian platform) have a daily 121 after the standup to talk about the 'real stuff',  new incidents / change requests in Remedy Force :s 

Then we pickup where we left the previous day or we take up the next story from our sprint.
We try to finish the stories in our 2 weekly sprints, but are often interrupted for questions in chats or we have meetings to attend because somebody needs a new workflow, plugin, custom field or filter/board.  If they can't do it them self with a little mental support from us and/or documentation we provided, we create a request into our backlog for one of the future sprints.

Once all meetings are finished we try to complete the story we started with before we finish the day.

As we shifted last year to 1 Agile way of working for the entire company, we only have a handful workflows to maintain with their proper custom fields and automation.

For now we are still on an on premise setup, meaning we invest a lot of time in

- Testing / upgrading add-ons.  

- Migrating data from other instances to the corporate instance

- Security / connectivity measures 

- Upgrading to the latest Enterprise version

- Conflicts between  add-ons who aren't always able to communicate with each others 'custom' fields.
(Elements Connect, Automation, Insight, Advanced Roadmap)

- Cleaning up legacy scripts / projects / workflows / custom fields 

- Merging data from squads

- Analyzing if we should go to Atlassian Cloud or Atlassian Data Center on a private AWS/ Azure

[Malka Jackson _Isos Technology_]

Honestly the following are not the common things I dealt with as a Jira Admin, but the one offs. I enjoyed the puzzle solving aspects of my daily admin job. These things were just some head scratchers.

User: I want to be able to delete issues in my project.

Me: Nope

User: But I am the VP

Me: Nope

User: But I am the Business Owner

Me: Nope

User: But... but... I need to. I made a bunch of mistakes. 

Me. Send me a list, I will clean them out, or mark them closed/created in error.

(This is the same user who deleted active stories out of an active sprint last quarter and caused the lockdown of the deletion permissions.)

User: I JUST need a SIMPLE automation rule.

Me: Sure thing, what's up?

User: I need a decision matrix to run on create issue that will triage an issue based on answers to questions and set priority of an issue.

Me: ... and you think that is JUST a SIMPLE automation rule? Would you like to sit with me while I figure out the math and code for that?

User clicks watch on every issue in the sprint. Complains about getting too many update emails about issues in the sprint. 

User can't find empty fields in new issue view after being taught how to unhide fields several times. Wants admin to unhide fields for them automagically. 

User asks about finding a plugin that will remind them to log time. I set an automation rule that pings them in chat about logging time once a day. User still doesn't log time. Complains they are getting nagged to log time. 

[Bridget]

CONGRATS to @Ignacio Pizarro , winner of the "Day in a life" contest! I will send you an email with your prize :). Thanks to everyone who participated on this thread! It was really fun to read all of your creative answers. We'll have another contest soon - you admins have a great sense of humor 😂

[Jimmy Seddon]

Congrats @Ignacio Pizarro!

[elizabeth_jones]

Congrats @Ignacio Pizarro

[Sam Huawey]

He was lucky enough to post the first comment. Most people do not bother reading full thread.

[Deleted user]

Spending hours to customizing Jira to match users' preferred way to work, only to reach a deal breaker functionality request that was entered into Jira's request backlog years ago and no update.

---

User: Can you help me find a ticket? 

Me: Sure, what is it about?

User: *Feature name*

Me: Did you try searching for it?

User: How do you search in Jira?

*People just use to modifying URL by issuekey

---

User: Jira is too complicated, I'll just use a spreadsheet to list my todos/status/description/estimated hours.

Me: Like the backlog?

User: Yes.

[Ignacio Pizarro]

@Bridget @Jimmy Seddon @elizabeth_jones thanks a lot !!! :D

[Stephanie Duprea]

Boss: Hey I started this workflow and it's not working

Me: ok

Boss: Can you fix it?

Me: of course

Me: Ugh, what did he do...might as well start over, too much work to clean it up

[Christel Gray]

I'm too late to the game to get some awesome swag, but just so you know, I would have submitted it as an interpretive dance!  LOL!

[Wendy Thorneloe]

First I just want to say.. I love Jira!! It makes my life so much easier!!!

Once upon a time I went to a conference and at this conference they had a booth presenting this product called Jira from Atlassian.

I got the info, brought it back to work and convinced my bosses to acquire it. My bosses getting Jira was the start of a new working life for me.

Now every chance I get I promote Jira and or Atlassian products to everyone I think could profit from it.  I think I should own some stocks in the company lol!!

People at my company know I'm the Queen of Jira and they come to me with ideas they want to do but don't know how.

I configure everything for them, offer them to look into Atlassian apps to bridge any gaps..

I'm always trying to learn as much as I can to make our working life easier and better..

Atlassian has made that possible with all the great products.

Thanks

Wendy

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

@Wendy Thorneloe , That's my official title "Jira Queen".  Make sure your HR updates your title and may you reign on...

[Jade J.]

Me: Components can be kind of like ticket subject matter, like the subject of the ticket

User: So subject?

Me: Yes

User: Can you change the word Component to Subject?

Me: Uh... not that one, I can make custom fields but not that one

[Ignacio Pizarro]

@Bridgetstill waiting for my Jira Swag 🙈

[Bridget]

Coming atcha @Ignacio Pizarro !

[Jay]

Congrats @Ignacio Pizarro  - all I can say reading this community post is man I am lucky.

The organisation I am with has been trying to use Jira for 20 months and this past 6 weeks the penny has finally dropped and everyone is on board.

But I do understand the 'whoa are you a sorcerer' comment from Chrissy :-D 

[Alex Steinlauf]

Spending a week trying to figure out how to set up a project configuration in a specific way/specific need. Only to take a break, come back, then have an epiphany of exactly how to do it. Happened to me when learning about setting up Issue Level Security. It's the best feeling.

[Jeramy Spring]

I know this is a few years late, but I have a good one from this morning actually.

12:44 AM - A user in India creates a Critical/Sev 1 Jira issue.

12:45 AM - PagerDuty alarm goes off, waking me up.

12:50 AM - I read the notification. User reports that they cannot access company timesheet. Now make note, I do not control the company timesheet website, this is our IT department.

12:55 AM - I acknowledge PagerDuty alert. 

1:00 AM - Respond to Jira ticket telling the user that I do not manage the company timesheet and that they need to create an IT ticket. I asked if not being able to access the company timesheet was critical or if it affected one of our clients.

1:15 AM - User responds that it is not client-facing. They wanted to record their working hours for the day, but the site was down.

1:20 AM - I respond to the user saying that this is not a "Wake up American team member" critical issue and that when they create the IT ticket to set it to a normal priority (as I get those alerts too).

1:30 AM - User responds, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that this would wake up staff in America. Okay, will do."

1:30 AM - I close the ticket.

2:00 AM - PagerDuty alert goes off. A user has created a Critical/Sev 1 ticket in the IT project with the summary, "Can't record time on timesheet, site down."

2:30 AM - Beat my head against the wall, start crying, and grab a stiff drink.

Gotta love the users...right?