How different is Project lead and Project Administrator role in JIRA?

[Pratibha V]

How different is Project lead and Project Administrator role in JIRA?

Who should be Project lead? SM/PO/Tech lead?

Who all can be assigned Project administrator role? As that is the only role which can delete issues, others attachments, others comments, change Reporter.... I want BAs to have the edit capability so that they can delete attachments not needed on cloned stories. 

Please advise on these two roles. and how preferred it is to have BA team on Project Admin role.  

[Max Foerster - K15t · Accepted solution]

Hey @Pratibha V ,

think of the project lead as a person who is responsible for the project and not necessarily also administering it. Like a team lead for example. You can use the project lead in different places like the default assignee for issues or in the permission scheme.

It's not comparable to the project roles used in permission schemes. You cannot add multiple users as project lead. The project administration is bound to the permission in the permission scheme and grants additional privileges like being able to manage members of project roles and customizing a project. I hope that answers your question.

Best, Max

[Pratibha V]

Thank you @Max Foerster - K15t . It answers part of my question. For managing stories BAs need to have some permissions(deleting unwanted stories, deleting attachments...) which I see is there for Project administrator, but Project administrator has more additional features, is it preferred to give that role to BAs on the team.  

[Esther Strom]

A user also needs to be a project admin to create releases and components, which is not something I'd normally consider "project customization", but rather release management. There are tickets open in Atlassian's own Jira suggesting splitting out release management as a separate set of permissions, but for now, @Pratibha V if you have users who need to manage releases, they will need project admin access.

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Yes @Esther Strom , you're right that requires the same permission. But I'd still go with the term project administration/customization. Release management is just one specific of the applications of the functionalities. You can use it for so much more. :) 

[Esther Strom]

Not arguing that point; I just wanted it to be clear if OP is new to Jira, as many of our users who come in from different systems or companies are used to being able to designate users as release managers in their non-Jira systems without having to give them full admin access. The problem a lot of us have with requiring project admin access to manage releases is that a release manager shouldn't necessarily have access to do a lot of the things a project admin can, but because of the way permissions are set up, they end up with that access. It's just something to be aware of when determining who has that access.

[Tomasz Rogawski]

 @Pratibha V answer depends how Jira project is used and how long it will be kept. If it is used to manage:

1. Ops activities (end date not defined), then Project Leader should be a team manager (not PM), because he will be the main contact person for Jira admin team in case of a Jira migration, schema or permission change long after a project is closed.
2. Project activities (defined project end date), then Project Leader should be a project manager, because after project closure, Jira project will be archived and then removed by Jira admin team.

As a Project Manager I was a Project Leader, and handover of Project Leader to a team manager was also one of my handover activities.