What would be your advice to first-time Jira Software admins?

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One of the big things we do at meetups is get together to solve problems. Take a look at https://aug.atlassian.com. I highly encourage you to attend a local meetup, if there is one in your area. Atlassian has Summit coming up in Las Vegas in a few weeks - It's also a fantastic place to learn more, work directly with Atlassian team members and solve problems.

Out of the box, Jira is pretty vanila. Create a project, open a ticket, get a single screen to type some basic fields, work the ticket, and close the ticket. Now, I've seen some companies add 100 required fields to open a ticket, workflows with dozens of required steps and some other wicked things setup. I assure you, that's company self inflicted pain, that Jira (being fully customizable and agnostic) allows you to do, but is something we all would not recommend unless there is a specific need that must get in the way of ease of use.

Again though, visit one of the meetups if you can, bring along system admins, product team leaders - whoever is in charge of the workflows so we can talk some sense into them and by all means - come to Summit in Las Vegas. I'll happily at least listen to your pain over a beer, and perhaps we'll even help out a bit to ease it.

Like • carolyn french likes this

Julie I have to agree with Gregory that maybe the issue is not the product but how it is setup in your organization. Being a Jira admin myself I can say that while it is highly customization and can be tricky to get right it's not THAT bad to administer. If you are finding that creating a ticket in Jira is a long drawn out process and hard to complete my hunch is that maybe in an attempt to get more value out of the product and track everything your organization has gone a bit overboard.

Like • Nic Brough -Adaptavist- likes this

That image is really helpful.

I am new to Jira but have used MS Project extensively. I love the ease of Jira for managing projects especially using the Agile methodology and scrums.

Thanks @Josh_Kochelek__Modus_Create awesome advise, I really appreciate the time you took to write all this up.

my very best advice .. Keep your Jira projects SIMPLE ! .

Use workflows and screens to fit your team needs

I am happy to support on your journey !

Like • Gary Pasquale likes this

Limit the amount of custom fields and only have a few admins.

As someone that does a ton of JIRA cleanup for large FinTech Enterprises and both agile and non-agile organization that use JIRA, Claudio’s advice is spot on!

Thanks for the wonderful tips! I just ordered the book, AND joined this community because of them. The project I am on is losing our "Jira Ninja" to another project, and I have been learning as much as I can from her for the past year, but came here to figure out how to continue my education without her when (or rather, before) she leaves. I feel much more confident that I'll be able to help the project continue as efficiently as it does with her help.

Like • Sanjog Sigdel likes this

Very Important and then take your time to understand the current setup

Like • Ignacio Pulgar likes this

Do you have any specific test prep tips for those studying to be a certified Jira Admin?

Hi @EW I like your last name. Maybe we're long lost sisters? ;) I have some Jira cert study tips here: https://www.jirastrategy.com/jira-certification/how-to-study-for-jira-administrator-certification. Hope this helps you or others.

Best of luck to you!

Like • EW likes this

Thank you, Rachel! This information looks great!

I think the common thread throughout this discussion is simplicity.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

We have 13k users and 1.3million Issues. Keeping things simple & minimising customisations is the only way to keep things moving.

We've seen our fair share of performance issues as our instance has grown. I dread to think how much worse things could have been if we had no been on top of customisations.

Like • Dietmar Schuck likes this

Play around. Just explore and see what you can do out of the box. Create a test project, mess with the workflow, create screens, create fields. Play. Enjoy the job.