JIRA / Confluence Administrator Support Staff

Larry Dribin January 17, 2013

Are there any guidelines as to the number of users a typical JIRA / Confluence Administrator can effectively support?

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Larry Dribin July 21, 2013

Thank you all for your help. We have already increased our Atlassian support staff on a temporary basis from to two to five and are in the process of budgeting for next year, where we hope to make this increase permanent. - Larry

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Ron Summers March 26, 2014

I would agree with Nic and Rahul that it is more the number of projects and the complexity of the schemes and workflows than the number of users. Unless the users need a lot of training and support for usage, then it might be a factor. But when you have a lot of projects (~500) with different schemes and workflows that people want customized, that can take a lot of effort.

My team supports several Atlassian applications as well as a couple of other applications and I divide the duties into front-end and back-end responsibilities. The front-end people triage all of our tickets coming in, work with the end-users and admin the user side of the applications (schemes, workflows, user/group management, etc.) and front-end configurations while my back-end people focus on the server side duties of installations, back-end configurations, working with our IT infrastructure people, monitoring, etc. I have found this approach works well because there are different skill sets involved.

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Larry Dribin January 17, 2013

I recently took over the management of a Atlassian System with 4,700 users in the US and India, 374 Local Groups, 329 Projects, 154 Global Spaces, so the system has to be up 24x7 7 Days / Week.

Although many of our workflows are simple, some of our more complex workflows have over 30 different issue types and provide workflow management for the entire SDLC Workflow from Idea to Deployment. For one large theam we support over 1,000 using this complex workflow. This team also uses Bamboo to continuous build the application.

For the past several years we have been managing the system with 2 very talented JIRA admins. They have been able to maintain the system and on-board some new users, but most user requested enhancements and requests for additional services either take a long time to fulfil or never get fulfilled.

I am in the process of developing a business case to request additional resources to better support our user community and was looking for some guideance from individuals with more experience supporting Atlassian Systems. Thanks in advance for your help. LarryD.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 17, 2013

That doesn't sound too unmanageable, until I read the bit about the complex workflow! I think you're spot on when asking for a third admin, even if it's only a lesser minion to get the basics done so the current admins can concentrate better. That's certainly worked on some of my client sites. With someone doing the really simple stuff and triage, the busier admins have been able to get stuck into the more difficult stuff.

I think there's a good argument here for your business case - do a quick report on those "long time to fulfill" and "never get done" cases and point out that many of them could be done if your current team had more help!

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Rahul Aich [Nagra]
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January 17, 2013

It totally upto the administrator how he configures his jira instance. If every project is allowed to have their own schemes for workflows/permissions/screens etc etc then a lot of admin time will be required to support them.

I would recommend that Jira admin use Jira as a support tool to service its customers and log time against each task .That way management would know how much time is being spend on jira admin activities and take necessary action.

Rahul

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 17, 2013

User numbers aren't that simple. I've supported systems with 30,000 users and it's been easier than one with 3,000 because of the way they were being used.

I'd actually forget the number of users as a useful guide and concentrate on complexity - how many projects, workflows and custom fields do you have? Even then, I can't give you a quantitative guide.

A random example - an old client of mine had around 25,000 users scattered across 3 countries. 2 countries were supported by 4 people who handled absolutely everything. The third country needed another 2 administrators to handle nothing more than the maintenance of the groups in that country. The difference - the first two regions had simply used roles in Jira and let the Project Owners look after their own user lists.

So, with that example, you can see why the users numbers are not enough - you need to judge it on complexity.

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