How to change project owner in new JIRA?

[Jean LAMY]

As an administrator I can't find a way to change project owner for a project created by one of my users.

I can only add or remove users.

As said, I'm using JIRA cloud with new design.

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi Jean,

do you mean the Project lead?  If so, do the following:

• open the project
• click on "Settings":
  
  
• then "Details" (if it is not open already):
  
  
• There you find the field "Project lead", which you can set to a new user

[Joseph Niemiec]

Hi Thomas,

I can't seem to find that in the current version. Right now I have complete admin access to our OnDemand cloud jira but there is no project lead option exposed to even be changed. 

Any ideas? I am fine making an API call if there is a way to say CURL some post data.

[Thomas Schlegel]

@Joseph Niemiec - it is there - here is a screenshot of a detail view, copied just now:

[Joseph Niemiec]

Hi @Thomas Schlegel  is this perhaps a theme issue? I have included what I see and the roles that I also have. 

[Joseph Niemiec]

It appears this problem is specific to the 'agility template' if I used anything else these options exist for me. 

[Dave Meyer]

Hi everyone,

Currently it's not possible to change the project lead for projects created with the Agility template (it's not related to the old vs new UI change).

We would love to hear what you use the Project Lead feature for so we can understand how we can incorporate it into the Agility project template in an improved way.

Cheers,

Dave Meyer

Jira Cloud Product Management

[Joseph Niemiec]

We would use this field for team lead so that people who are not currently working on that project understand who the main point of contact is. This assists with targeting general questions and for new hires to easily onboard and understand the differing project leaders he may need to communicate with. Otherwise we end up having to do this in confluence and its disconnected from Jira itself persay. 

PS - Epics don't work with Agility either which appears to break Jira Portfolio's usefulness.  

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @Joseph Niemiec, thanks for replying! Where do your users normally find this? On the project list page?

[Joseph Niemiec]

That is correct, from our corporate confluence homepage we have a nice HUGE Jira logo (1 of 6 important links) that links directly to the Project Page skipping the dashboards and going right to the overview. 

Of course I am open to other ideas/recommendations to do with this. We are looking at Team Calendar but also concerned if its features will be as useful with the 'Agility' template. 

[Dave Meyer]

Hi Joseph, totally understand. I'll take your feedback to the team to inform how we prioritize adding this back to the Project Details page.

In the meantime, it's still possible to update the project lead via the Jira REST API. You can do this by running something like:

curl -X PUT \
 https://EXAMPLE.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/project/PROJECT_KEY \
 -H 'Authorization: Basic APITOKEN' \
 -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
 -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 -d '{"lead" : "USERNAME"}'

 where EXAMPLE is your Jira Cloud instance, PROJECT_KEY is the key of the project you want to change, APITOKEN is a token you generate from here, and USERNAME is the username of the user you want to set the lead to.

[Joseph Niemiec]

@Dave Meyer you rock Thank you for sharing the details on the curl command. Can't wait to sit down and give it a whirl tomorrow. 

[Ankit Goyal]

@Dave Meyer Thank you Dave for your solution. Unfortunatley, I do not know where to put this code. I am not a developer myself but a JIRA Admin and have been using Jira Cloud. I need this functionality very urgently to change the project creators. I would create all projects for the project leads. The project leads can then go in and add epics, task, teams for their project. 

[brett anderson]

The provided code doesn't seem to work anymore. I just tried:

curl -D- -u EMAIL:API_TOKEN -X PUT \
https://EXAMPLE.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/project/PROJECT_KEY \
-H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"lead" : "NEW_LEAD_USERNAME"}'

Now I'm getting a 200 response code instead of 401 unauthorized, but it just seems to return the project details, not update the lead. 

[Erik de Jong]

I can confirm that your code works, Brett. Thanks.

[Jonathan Miles]

I got Brett's code above to work, but had to do some digging. First, I had to get the list of users that had Jeff.

curl -D- -u <email>:<api key> -X GET \
https://<instance>.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/user/search?username=jeff* -k

Then I parsed the returned JSON and got

"name":"<db guid>"

 Then I ran Brett's code as so:

curl -D- -u <email>:<api key> -X PUT \
https://<instance>.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/project/<key> -k \
-H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"lead" : "<db guid>"}'

And boom, it worked.

[Julien Daxbek]

Perfect, this method works like a charm. Thanks ! 

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Dave Meyer : how many votes is it going to take to get this Change Lead feature request shipped??

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17323

[Craig Anderson]

Please add a feature to change this.    Currently we have projects owned by someone who is no longer at the company.   This is not a good situation.

[Alex Shipp]

+1 I am in the same situation

[Parham Momtahan]

I am in the same situation

[wjgilmore]

+1. We have several projects owned by users who are no longer with the company. This doesn't make any sense.

[khairulamri]

+1. I'm also in the same situation. I can only change the Project Lead but not the Owner.

[Katherine Maddox]

+1 as well. Is there really no way to remove the project owner? In our case, the owner has left the company and we cannot deactivate her account since she is a project owner. Is there anyway to change/delete her without deleting the project?

[Anatolii Kirzo]

+1 same

[Marshall Lucas]

We all still need this ability.  When someone leaves we have no way to set the Project Owner to another user which prevents changing some of the filters and other things about the project.  There needs to be a way to change the user that OWNS the project.

Thanks,

Aoife

[Sandi Slavko]

(Cloud version)

use this URL: <JIRA-URL>/secure/admin/filters/ViewSharedFilters.jspa

OR 

Admin --> Jira Settings --> System --> Shared Filters

-- find your board & select *** --> Change Owner --> enter new user name & Save

[marisa.jones]

The second option settings - This worked great, thank you!

[Peter Whelan]

Is there a separate field for "Product owner"?

The "Product owner" is a typically a different person than the "Project lead"

I rarely want to automatically assign issues to the "product owner".  I like that the issue can automatically be assigned to the "project lead" . I do not want to treat that field as the "product owner"

It's annoying that the "Project lead" field in Jira project details shows up as "Owner" in project listing.  Consistently labelling fields using the common scrum related terminology would make things clearer.

[jillian]

Hi @Peter Whelan, 

Thanks so much for the feedback on labelling terminology!  We'll introduce custom roles in the future so that you can create roles (and consistently label them) in a way that makes sense for your team. 

Cheers,

Jillian Stein

Jira Cloud Product Management

[Sascha Portisch]

i would also vote +1 for the possibility to change the "project owner", as in my company they change from time to time on the projects. And in the Projectoverview filtered by lead you get the wrong Persons shown.

[UNICOPE]

Please change that asap, we have a project leader that left the company and I cannot deactivate the user due to that. So its blocking the license!!!

[A L]

We created a next-gen Jira Project by importing from Trello, and the project lead is set to the name of the person who did the import. Please can we have the option to change the project lead!

[A L]

Seriously, this issue was raised over a year ago!

[Steffen Lyng]

Please make it possible to replace Project Owner

[Ronald Petty]

We removed the former owner and now get "former user" as the owner.  Be nice to actually attach to existing employee (easily).

[Steffen Lyng]

Come on Atlassian.. 18 months since this request was made. It seems so simple to fix.

[Jay Beta]

Agreed its been 18 months. This shouldn't be this hard.

[Gerard]

Please, fix it ASAP! It's important for us.

[Shafi Shafizada]

+

[Susan Escalona]

Add our team to the people who need this. We had a few folks move around projects and roles or leave and now we're stuck with legacy mis-information. Unacceptable.

[Mike Amerson]

@Atlassian, Please help.  Im stuck.
I removed an old employee from Jira, who was the original product owner for the project im working on. Im the admin on the project, but it doesn't grant ownership.  Now i can't change the statuses on any of the tasks i've added, nor can any other admin on the project. 
What can i do to fix this?

[Sandi Slavko]

FOUND IT!  worked for me (Cloud version)

use this URL: <JIRA-URL>/secure/admin/filters/ViewSharedFilters.jspa

OR 

Admin --> Jira Settings --> System --> Shared Filters

-- find your board & select *** --> Change Owner --> enter new user name & Save

[Stefanos Avramidis]

Thank you so much. I've been tearing my hair out over this!

[Carlos Mioto]

Great tip, Sandi. Works fine. 

Thanks. 

[Monica Morris]

This worked for me also Sandi, thank you so much!

[Sandi Slavko]

FOUND IT!  worked for me (Cloud version)

use this URL: <JIRA-URL>/secure/admin/filters/ViewSharedFilters.jspa

OR 

Admin --> Jira Settings --> System --> Shared Filters

-- find your board & select *** --> Change Owner --> enter new user name & Save

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

This is now the only way to get it changed:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Ultimate-agility-the-ONLY-way-to-change-a-Next-Gen-Project-lead/ba-p/1296695#M1232

[Lucas Duggins]

Why can't someone in the Project administrators role change the Project lead?  I look at the project lead as a business sponsor, those individuals change from time to time,  and a Global admin should not be the only person allowed to change that.  It should be any Project Admin assigned to the project.  Can we get this changed?