3 Benefits to Keeping Your Jira Admin Team Small

When teams are new to adopting Jira, the amount of requests for changes or information can seem overwhelming. Users who consider themselves self-sufficient may apply pressure to your team for you to just grant them administrative rights to Jira, so that they can take care of their own requests. The temptation to give in to these types of requests can be alluring. At first glance, this seems like an easy solution to take a load off your plate and make your own ticket queue more manageable, but in the long run, too many Jira admins can cause more disruption than you think.

The list below is the top three reasons to make sure you keep your group of Jira System Administrators small.

1. Standardize policy and procedure

Perhaps the most important reason to keep your admin group close-knit  is to standardize your policies and procedures within Jira. When your team is new to Jira and your instance is relatively small, this might not seem as important, but that is the best time to set some standards. Setting up guardrails and templates to use will help prevent your Jira instance from spiraling into disarray as you grow.

For example, if you let people create things like Statuses and Issue Types at their whim, you’ll often end up with situations where you have duplicates, like the status “Cancelled” vs “Canceled,” or the issue type “Report” vs “Reporting.” As you grow, things like this will become confusing for users trying to set up boards and filters, leading to more work for you. It’s better to eliminate it before it even has a chance to start by setting up a standard for when new issue types, statuses, custom fields, etc. will be made.

This is especially important for teams that are aiming to use Advanced Roadmaps. Having teams on standardized schemes is something you’ll thank your past self for when it comes time to start utilizing Plans. The more variation there is between projects, the more time you’ll have to spend accounting for every possible “what if” when configuring your Roadmaps.

2. Easier insight into changes

Almost as important to setting standards, is the ability to keep track of who is doing what in your instance. Although Jira has a robust Audit Log you can utilize, it doesn’t necessarily catch every single action. It’s also easier to look through your open or recent Jira support tickets than it is to sift through logs and try to piece together how and why a change was made. Keeping your admin group small aids in communication about changes to your environment, including when and why they are happening. Circling back to point one, having standardized policies and procedures will also help prevent these situations in the first place.

3. Become well-rounded experts

Finally, a big reason to have a small number of people focus on Jira is to give them the opportunity to become experts in the application. When teams get too big, it’s very easy for them to fall into silo-ing their knowledge. One person becomes the dedicated “workflow” person, another becomes the “permissions” person, and so on. This style of work is risky, because if your “workflow” person is unavailable for any reason, you’ll find yourself suddenly scrambling to learn the information to fill the gap. 

By dedicating time and resources to Jira, your team will hopefully become a well-oiled machine that works together, and hopefully the potential issues in point two will become a thing of the past. It will also help them craft better-informed policy and procedures, and come up with creative solutions for your users. When users who aren’t trained in Jira are given system admin rights, they are prone to make mistakes simply because they didn’t realize the impact their changes would have. The best solution for these types of problems is to prevent them in the first place.

Hopefully these three points helped to provide insight as to why it’s important to keep your Jira instance as a tightly-run ship. If you’ve found yourself in a spot where you can’t dedicate an internal resource to your Atlassian Suite, consider looking into a Managed Services partner to meet your needs. It’s never too late to align your admin team and get your Jira back into tip-top shape!