Who mostly manages/administers Jira in your organization?

[Derek McDonald]

Is it the scrum master/project manager or the product owner?

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Derek!

We have a large enough organization that I am the full time Administrator. I am also a Kanban Coach and Trainer, but the vast majority of my time is performed as the tools administrator. 

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

if you have a very small instance (1-2 teams) then maybe consider one of those. However, IMO this needs to be managed w/in your IT support team if you have one. Generally IT is responsible for administering software applications. With that said, it is more about the persons experience and availability than who they report to.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Derek McDonald 

Welcome to the community.

What level of managing/administering JIRA are you asking about? There is project management, and then there is management of the overall JIRA instance including user access, global permissions, schemes used to configure projects, managing add-ons, and so on.

[Derek McDonald]

Hi, Trudy.  Thanks.  From the project management perspective.

[Trudy Claspill]

From the perspective of managing individual projects within JIRA and managing the issues within those projects, in a multinational organization that I was at it was a mix depending on the composition of the teams working in the projects. Sometimes it was a scrum master, sometimes a product owner. Not all teams had the luxury of a product owner or a scrum master, and the JIRA project was "managed" by an engineer on the team. That is about day-to-day management of issues and priorities.

From the perspective of managing cross-project elements, like custom fields, configuration schemes, and users, that large organization I was in opted to have that handled by a DevOps team that was responsible for managing and administering all the tools used by the development teams. If you have a large organization and the Directors want some sort of meaningful reports across all the teams using JIRA, then you must centrally managed how those projects are configured.

For smaller organizations that don't require that sort of cross-project roll-up, you might consider letting each team self-manage their project and go with Next Gen projects. Then they have more freedom to create the workflows and fields that are meaningful to their project work.

If you are going to use Classic projects, then for sanity's sake I would say you need a central JIRA administration team that handles cross-project elements, and allow the teams to manage only the content/issues of their projects.

Whomever ends up being in charge of that content of projects for the teams needs to have some authority to set priorities for the team and hold the team accountable.