Is Jira administration a difficult task?
Understanding how things actually work has given me the ability to always ask questions. Most of the time, those questions have questions and the sub-question to that question has a question but when does it ever end?
When administering Jira, it so happens that your user will get a requirement that doesn’t fit well with how you administer Jira and that’s okay. Usually, most users in an organization work in various department and each department come with its own unique way of working. Be it the HR team in how they recruit new employees or the Marketing team on how they project sales and get budget for advertising etc. Despite what the requirements may be, it is the job of the Jira administrator to figure out what works best with their use case and how it fits into the functionality that Jira provides.
It is not everything that a user requires as a feature will exist within one application
The above statement is true but why? Why would a requirement, which is not so far fetch or impossible be a problem for the administrator? Asking yourself this question as an administrator is a good step but you can always go further in finding out a solution that would work. The REST API of Jira is by far a vast collection of features that can be manipulated at will to give your administrative work ease of access to doing things you wish you could purchase from an addon. That’s if the finance team is willing to provide the additional budget to your team or department.
Anyway, on a serious note, I believe administrative work becomes less hectic when you equip yourself with the below:
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Educate yourself on the appropriate tools that are out there that help with Integration.
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Make full use of Atlassian REST API capabilities. If it doesn’t exist most probably it can be done via API
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Read forums and join a community network so you can get updated on the latest trends surrounding the use of Jira. If you’re in the Atlassian community and reading this, that’s a good start.
Back to the question of this article, “Is Jira administration a difficult task”? The answer is “No”, proper administration means setting the right configurations needed to get you up and running each and every day. This means you have to think about the future state of your projects, goals, and outcomes that will make your organization successful. This can also translate to changes that can scale in the next 1 - 2 years or one that doesn’t work. You can start by understanding the various organizational functionalities within your company and projecting what will the requirement be like before they happen.
Proper planning is better than no plan
So before going into administration task as though it is a daily routine, put in that effort to understand your organization goals, that way you can begin to think about areas of improvement. In a way that once a new requirement comes in from any department, you will have a solution that is ready and primed for deployment without pulling your hair and not knowing what to do. Therefore, being a Jira administrator starts with knowing your product and knowing the best practices that exist in the ecosystem called “Jira”.
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Prince Nyeche
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