Worst Jira Admin Contest: A Hundred Admins

[#1]

Mistake 12

How many application administrators should an application have?

At one company, there were 132! There were no procedures to determine who was eligible for application-level admin access. It didn't matter if you were a technical development team manager or a non-technical project manager. It didn't matter if you had years of experience supporting an application or had no experience at all. Anyone who asked for admin privileges got them. Those users made any changes they wanted. Changes weren't planned, logged, or communicated. Changes often had negative impacts on other projects or the application as a whole. Schemes were duplicated multiple times. Custom fields were misspelled. Apps were installed and never used or uninstalled. The stability and usability of the application degraded every day. A complex query or a re-index would bring the entire application down!

Instead, determine the number of administrators needed (minimum and maximum) to properly support the application. This range should be determined by user count, project count, frequency of user requests, and aggressiveness of the routine maintenance schedule. Having too few administrators leaves your application unsupported especially during holiday breaks, emergency events, or when other company priorities arise. Having too many administrators results in conflicting changes or modifications inconsistent with the overall application strategy.

Admin Strategy Considerations

To decide who is responsible for the application, answer the following:

• What is the minimum and maximum number of admins needed to properly support the application?

• Who will make initial and ongoing configuration changes?

• Who will maintain the application?

• Who will vet and approve third-party apps, integrations, and connections?

• Who will train new users, power users, and admins?

• For Server and Data Center:

  • Who will perform regular upgrades?

  • Who will ensure application, server, database, and network stability?

Bonus Tip

Avoid the "one team manages ALL company apps" strategy. If the team has many apps to maintain, will Jira get the attention it deserves? Do the admins for "all the other apps" understand the specifics of Jira administration? Instead, form a dedicated team of admins who actually LIKE and care about the application!

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Back to intro and mistakes list

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

First time I went to an Atlassian Summit, @Matt Doar was giving a talk about how to look after a large Jira instance.

He spotted me in the audience and asked me if I agreed that the right number is between 2 and 11.  I'd argue that it should be more towards 3 than 10, but heck yes, 3-10 is right.

3 is the minimum because you want at least one person looking after it, but 2 other people need to be able to get in, just in case the main admin and one of the others can't work. 10 is a bit large to my mind, because you're talking about a team of admins here, which is generally not going to work well when you have 8 or more in the team. 

For the larger teams, you absolutely have to have them work together as a team, you should never have admins who work in separate teams.

[Matt Doar]

And they need to be able to have holidays!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, I shortened "sick, unexpected event, holidays, and and and" to "can't work".

I've lost count of the places where I've had to use "brute force and ignorance" (not sure where I picked up that colloquialism) to get into an Atlassian service where they only had one admin who had gone AWOL for some reason.

There is no excuse for not having at least two people with admin access (except in the case that it is a single user system).  And although two is ok, you absolutely need three.

Note that this is about admin access, not administrators doing the work.  

The place I worked at before Adaptavist had seven people with system admin access to their Jira and Confluence.  Four of us covered all the admin work, from day-to-day stuff through to system upgrades, but our boss, their boss, and their PA also had admin accounts.  The boss people never did any admin, they only had the access so that they could add or remove other admins in unexpected cases like "the regular admin team went for lunch and the eatery got hijacked by Daleks, so they're all unavailable" (I used that extreme example because it happened)

[Matt Doar]

"The eatery go hijacked by Daleks"

As it does. But I think that story needs to be told with a drink sometime

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It made me make tea for it all week.