5 Best Practices your JIRA Admin Should be Doing

I am going to be kicking off April with a series of posts covering tips and tricks for JIRA Administrators; whether you have just started using JIRA or you have seen a few Projects in your time, I want to share with you some best practices I have picked up along the way so you do not fall into the same pitfalls!

1.     Your Organisation’s Working Standards are your Best Friend

Ever had a meeting or a conversation with a potential Product Owner who expressed interest in a new JIRA Project, and by the end of the interaction you thought to yourself, “Damn, I’m going to have to customise everything to give the Product Owner what they want”.

Make sure your organisation agrees on some working standards. Everyone wants to work their own way without thinking about the bigger picture: the result will be you managing more workflows, more schemes, more permissions, etc.

Ask your lead, manager, department head to define the following;

• What working standards has your organisation got in place?
• Does more than one person work on one issue?
• Does the issue need to go through a review?
• Who can transition / close issues?
• What information would every department need to complete the issue?
• Do teams work to different standards within the organisation?
• And so on….

Conclusion: use your Organisation’s Working Standards as your JIRA Body Armour

Adopting a standard workflow process or project setup requires more than good JIRA administration skills, you need to be able to recommend and influence users to align to your organisation’s standard.

2.     Giving Away your Rights!

You have just updated a shared workflow to adhere to your organisation’s process guidelines, the next day you discover, with horror, all your changes have been either altered or reverted to their original versions. One of the other Administrators was not aware of the process changes, and in an effort to fix the perceived unofficial changes has wasted not only their time but your time as well since you will now have to do the same work again.

Conclusion: only give admin rights to people who know what they are doing

The best way to correctly administer your JIRA instance is to understand precisely the impact of the change you are implementing. Limit your number of JIRA Administrators. The fewer the better (my suggestion would be no more than 3 Administrators). It is better to only have a single, fully dedicated Jira Administrator rather than several partially dedicated. If you decide to have several you should implement collaborative processes; meet up once per week to discuss pain points, topics raised by users, potential improvements, etc.

3.     Build a Test Project

Whether you are one JIRA Admin, or you are part of an Admin team within your organisation, once you start making changes to your JIRA instance, however small, people are going to notice. By now, every change you implement is taken into consideration, so why not create an “Administrator’s Eden” to test changes, your own test project, for you and your Admins.

Build your Test Project in mind for trying out your latest ideas. You already know the collaborative processes if you followed my previous advice, you'll learn how JIRA can empower you and you team through consistent iteration and improvement.

Start with the stuff that comes out of the box from Atlassian, though don't be afraid to change it to meet your teams' needs. Add a small number of people for testing purposes, if you have a Quality Assurance team within your organisation reach out to them, they already have a good eye for noticing issues and they are part of your “live” userbase.

Conclusion: Create a Test Project and test every change to your JIRA instance before pushing it live.

Excellent, now that you are going to create a new Test Project. Let’s move on to the next tip, naming conventions.

4.     Create a Naming Convention

You have created a new Test Project and have begun to improve on your current JIRA schemes; you have changed Field Configurations Schemes, Issue Type Screen Schemes and Workflow Schemes too many times, no one has deleted the previous versions of those schemes or the elements associated to them, e.g. Fields Configurations, Screens, and Workflows. Instead, all the previous versions have started to pile up as no one confirmed if they were ever needed again. What you need to do is implement a consistent versioning and naming convention system.

Create a naming convention before you change anything and append the way Jira natively names elements, rather than change them completely so that when you try to get your bearings you can easily find them, since you know what you are looking for, e.g. if Jira names it DEV Screen Scheme, you name it Development Screen Scheme, not just Development.

Once you have a naming convention add a version number at the end of every element, e.g. v1.0, v1.1, and document your changes. I document all my changes in my JIRA Test Project on the impacted issues themselves, this allows anyone else to view the changes and keeps a record on the relating issue. Alternatively, why not document your changes on Confluence, the important thing to keep in mind is that you have a record of your changes.

Conclusion: Keep it simple, reuse the naming convention and implement version control. This piece of advice is applicable on so many levels: workflows, custom fields, agile boards, dashboards, etc.

5.     Stay calm and work on one problem at a time!

Some sage advice, “don’t try to solve a complex problem in a day, spend some time each day to explore the aspects of the problem and develop a solution”. It may take you a little longer, however you will fully understand the problem before rushing in, compromising your quality of work, to implement a solution.

Document the problem (use your Test Project to create a Bug), the potential solutions you have tried, and the click path you used to get to your preferred solution. You as an Admin, no matter what your experience level, you can become overwhelmed by all the similar admin screens, you may find yourself clicking around in circles, unable to find what you are looking for.

Conclusion: Work on one problem at a time and take your time with the solution

Thanks for taking the time to read the article and I hope this helps.