Jira Customization Best Practices to Power-up Your Team

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New features. Faster speeds. More security. 

Atlassian constantly improves Jira to meet evolving customer needs, enabling you to focus on your innovations.

As a Jira admin, you have a very important role: to facilitate teamwork and extend the capabilities of Jira along the way. Done properly, you can customize your Jira Software into a powerful platform that can scale at the speed of your business. 

Want to scale Jira for enterprise deployment? You can seamlessly integrate the system with a variety of enterprise tools, such as Slack, GitHub, and Zendesk, to name a few. Not just that, you can write your own scripts to fulfill your organization’s unique needs. 

However, it’s important to avoid over-customizing Jira. Redundant add-ons or scattered custom fields can bog down your instance with conflicting workflows and reporting, causing all kinds of headaches to stakeholders. And you wouldn’t want to be the performance bottleneck of the team. 

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - Albert Einstein

To make the most out of your Jira Software, without putting too much pressure on it, follow our Jira customization recommendations below:

Assign Jira Admin Roles

Regardless of your organization size, you must assign one or a number of Jira admins to take control of the system. For big enterprises, you may have multiple user roles administrating Jira projects - product admins, site admins, and organization admins. Limit the number of admins to prevent overlapping responsibilities among them.

Read more: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/give-users-admin-permissions-964957877.html

Also, be sure that all of your admins are Atlassian certified. It is crucial that you have adequate support from an Atlassian expert, that’s why many organizations invest in partner solutions to take care of their administrative tasks. 

Establish Jira Governance

It’s not enough to just have admins. You need to set procedures and enforce standards for software usage implementing governance across your Atlassian products. This is to ensure integrity, structured reporting, and smooth collaboration between teams. 

Always walk through customization planning before accepting any new request. This means diving deep into your user’s specific problem before implementation. 

Without proper governance, you can end up bogging down your system with redundant data. Let’s look at the example below, all the statuses in this workflow indicate the same stage of the project:

Read more: Issue statuses, priorities, and resolutions 

You can avoid this simply by limiting the amount of customization allowed at the team-level. Make sure that your Jira admins evaluate all user requests to understand the impact on other teams and projects.

Governance is absolutely necessary to centralize documentation of internal practices and workflow schemes for Jira. From there, you can discuss potential changes with stakeholders before deciding on another customization.

Integrate and Manage Add-ons Strategically

By right, Jira doesn’t limit the number of apps you can install from the Marketplace. But the best practice is to always work within the base system. You should only consider an add-on if Jira out-of-the-box is insufficient. 

From embedding checklists to integrating Gantt charts in Jira, there are thousands of apps that can endlessly extend the power of Jira. Try to source apps that can be deployed for multiple instances and projects. Also, avoid installing multiple add-ons with similar functions.

Customization Planning and Execution

Now into the intricacies of customization.

Create a prototype and document your team’s proof of concept to understand how the new implementation works. From there, you can determine the next steps with your users to roll out changes effectively. 

Once you have evaluated a new customization request, make sure to conduct a backward compatibility check as well. It’s important to make sure any change, big or small, is compatible with the entire system. For instance, when you install an app to create custom fields, make sure that it is compatible with your current reporting solution. 

As with any new feature deployment, always do it in a staging environment before going live. 

There you go! Now you can power-up your Jira with confidence. I hope you find this article useful. If you have more tips or experience customizing Jira, do share them in the comments! 

[vlad.puhach]

Thanks @Sean Osawa at Ricksoft , great article about Jira Admin setup and some useful best practices.

[Sean Osawa at Ricksoft]

@vlad.puhach 

Thank you. I'm glad to hear you like it! :)

[Taranjeet Singh]

@Sean Osawa at Ricksoft  Nice article on some of the best practices on JIRA customization. Thanks for sharing!

[Yogesh Mude]

Thank you @Sean Osawa at Ricksoft  for the useful tips.