WHAT DOES AN JIRA ADMINISTRATOR DO?

Published: Nov 12, 2025 - The Jira Administrator designs and configures Jira Software, Core, and Service Management to meet evolving business and Agile project needs. This role manages workflows, permissions, dashboards, integrations, and day-to-day administration while ensuring system performance and scalability. The administrator also supports user training, resolves technical issues, and promotes Atlassian best practices through documentation and stakeholder collaboration.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Jira Administrator

1. Jira Administrator Duties

  • Business Collaboration: Work with multiple Lines of Business to define implementation designs, including system diagrams, data models, and business process diagrams.
  • Architectural Design: Engage with enterprise architects for design collaboration and review
  • Project Oversight: Oversee the implementation of assigned JIRA/Confluence projects, ensuring the implementation is consistent with design decisions, standards, and best practices
  • User Experience: Continuously seek to improve the user experience, enterprise implementation, and adoption to ensure industry competitiveness and edge
  • Programming Languages: Development languages, including JavaScript (Node/Angular), PHP, Java, Python, Shell Scripting, SQL
  • Workflow Design: Design, implement, and maintain custom workflows, screens, dashboards, fields, permission schemes, post functions, etc, to serve as templates for Agile teams across the TechOps organization
  • Atlassian Administration: Provide configuration and administrative support of the self-hosted Atlassian tool suite and future Cloud Atlassian tool suite, including multiple Jira Projects, Confluence, Github, Advanced Roadmaps, Jira Align, Big Picture, Tempo, etc.
  • Reporting Tools: Build advanced filters (i.e, Scriptrunner), custom dashboards, and reports
  • Support Management: Coordinate and respond to support requests, manage licenses, and costs
  • Plugin Management: Install, configure, test, and manage add-ons, plug-ins, and extensions
  • Skill Development: Actively develop and improve the Jira skill set by keeping aware of Jira industry trends, tools, and techniques
  • Training Delivery: Conduct training on Jira/Confluence, as well as navigating the projects and spaces
  • IT Collaboration: Effectively collaborate and communicate with IT staff, security, etc, to coordinate infrastructure maintenance
  • Product Lifecycle: Understanding of the end-to-end product development life cycle, best practices, and project management methodologies
  • PI Planning: Understanding PI Planning and being able to facilitate toolsets to help with the planning process (i.e, Jira Align or other)

2. Jira Administrator Details

  • Jira Transition: Use deep technical expertise and experience in Jira and related Atlassian technologies to help the transition from Trello and ensure the use of Jira following best practices and scalable strategies.
  • Subject Expertise: Serve as a subject matter expert on Jira to field questions and provide hands-on support to product teams as they move forward with the adoption of Jira tools and practices.
  • Workflow Development: Develop JIRA workflows, customizations, integrations, and support teams’ workflows on behalf of project management and leadership teams.
  • Dashboard Reporting: Develop effective dashboards and reporting to support leadership and project teams.
  • Team Mentorship: Mentor other Fools, sharing best practices to help guide teams to technical excellence in using Jira and related technologies.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Identify and build relationships with the key stakeholders and teams to foster collaboration in working on solutions and ultimately enhance the lives of everyone touching the Jira platform.
  • Vision Communication: Help to proactively communicate the Jira vision and collaborate at all levels, Business leads and Technical Leadership (DevOps, DBAs, Infosec, WPT, Engineering/Infrastructure, and Development) teams to ensure a cohesive and consistent approach.
  • Vision Execution: Help execute on that vision with hands-on design, implementation, mentorship, and team building.

3. Jira Administrator Responsibilities

  • Requirements Planning: Plan and facilitate requirements gathering workshops to plan Jira workflows and configurations.
  • Business Translation: Interpret and translate business requirements into product configurations, leveraging Atlassian best practices.
  • Jira Administration: Configure and administer Jira Software, Jira Core, and Jira Service Management, plus related apps and third-party tools.
  • Workflow Design: Design, implement, and maintain custom workflows, global settings, users and groups, screens, dashboards, fields, permission schemes, post functions, etc., to serve as templates for Agile teams across the company.
  • Application Management: Administer application instances on a day-to-day basis by setting up and supporting projects, roles, workflows, security, and plug-ins.
  • Process Optimization: Optimize and improve process workflows and identify where functionality can be improved to meet user requirements.
  • System Maintenance: Maintain a healthy application environment by periodically reviewing and modifying configurations, permissions, workflows, dashboards, integrations, and logs.
  • System Integration: Support integrations to external systems by collaborating with the external stakeholders.
  • Issue Resolution: Investigate, troubleshoot, and fix issues related to Atlassian tools suite, application servers, and database servers.
  • Agile Methodology: Apply a solid understanding of Agile principles when recommending project management methodologies (scrum, Kanban, waterfall, etc).
  • Best Practices: Provide recommendations to users and management on best practices and standardization in implementing projects and processes within Jira and the Atlassian suite.
  • Documentation Management: Create and maintain detailed technical and user-facing documentation and standard operating procedures, guides, and desk aids to support usability and issue resolution.

4. Jira Administrator Job Summary

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-functional teams across the organization, gather requirements to develop, and deliver custom templates, workflows using Atlassian products (JIRA, Service Desk, Confluence, etc.).
  • Template Development: Develop custom templates in JIRA to manage projects, epics, issues/tasks for the entire organization.
  • Atlassian Administration: Design, develop, and administer Atlassian products, deploying custom plugins for JIRA as well as evaluating plugins from the marketplace.
  • Infrastructure Management: Install and maintain Atlassian infrastructure for High Availability via Data Centre, version, and set up load balancers for scaling the application on-Demand along with configuring the Firewall and Network Security features for the Servers.
  • Project Management: Create, customize, and maintain small/large projects with users ranging from 100-2000 with up to 300 projects, spaces, build plans, workflows, and repositories in the Atlassian tool stack.
  • Dashboard Reporting: Create, maintain, and support dashboards and advanced filters for end users' reporting capabilities.
  • User Management: Provide user management and grant user permissions using LDAP/SSO integration.
  • Documentation Management: Create and maintain detailed technical and user-facing documentation.

5. Jira Administrator Accountabilities

  • Project Migration: Perform migrations of projects in JIRA and migrations of spaces in Confluence.
  • Migration Support: Provide consultation, support, and implementation on migration to Atlassian tools.
  • Employee Training: Conduct training for employees and new hires on JIRA and Confluence regarding how to use the tools, new functionality, etc.
  • Issue Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot and resolve issues as they arise with JIRA projects and Confluence in coordination with other admins, partner teams, Atlassian Premier Support, and TAMs.
  • System Backup: Ensure that necessary system backups are performed, and storage rotation of backups is accomplished.
  • Process Optimization: Provide continuous optimization for a very good customer experience.
  • Continuous Improvement: Proactively identify areas of improvement and innovative solutions to complex problems.
  • Script Development: Create custom post functions and triggers using Groovy Script in Atlassian.
  • Application Upgrade: Perform application upgrades with scheduled downtime and preemptive communication to the customer.

6. Jira Administrator Functions

  • Solution Design: Recommend and administer solution design for the Jira Align tool with the ability to configure all levels, including Enterprise, Program, Solutions, and Teams.
  • OKR Framework: Design, configure, and implement the OKR value engineering framework within a tool based upon the client’s requirements.
  • Requirement Definition: Define product requirements, business rules, acceptance criteria, and test cases that support the client’s Jira Align instance.
  • Requirement Gathering: Facilitate gathering of business and technical requirements from cross-functional partners, including Agile Coaching office, Enterprise Portfolio Management, Agile Release Trains, and Quarterly Business Review reporting needs.
  • Product Review: Review and approve user stories, use cases, and UX/UI wireframes that align with the client’s product definition for Jira Align.
  • Meeting Facilitation: Facilitate complex team meetings involving business and technical resources, including third-party vendors.
  • Team Leadership: Lead a diverse group of resources developers, technical architects, program and project managers, product owners, testing leads, and testers.
  • Decision Support: Ensure business and technology decisions are reached to support business goals and objectives.
  • Relationship Management: Establish and drive long-term relationships across all required verticals.
  • Product Support: Support testing, launch, and ongoing product management.

7. Jira Administrator Job Description

  • Tool Configuration: Configure, manage, and enhance Jira and Confluence tools, including native functionality, as well as researching, testing, and implementing plugins.
  • Project Management: Create JIRA projects, queries, and reports.
  • Workflow Customization: Create custom workflows, post functions, and validators, make changes to workflows, screens, fields, and reporting, and provide ongoing support and configuration maintenance.
  • Workflow Design: Create complex JIRA workflows, including project workflows, security schemes, screen schemes, JIRA vocabulary, and permission and notification schemes.
  • Metrics Reporting: Configure metrics, dashboards, reports, and advanced filters in JIRA/Confluence to provide end-users and business leadership with meaningful operational/performance metrics and status reports.
  • Account Management: Create new accounts, manage permissions, and build dashboards.
  • Script Management: Create and maintain scripts.
  • Issue Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot access and/or performance issues.
  • Confluence Support: Support Confluence requirements, including security, spaces, design, and integration with JIRA.
  • Jira Expertise: Provide Jira SME support to teams via approved collaboration tools.
  • Administrative Management: Create, manage, and support all administrative functions associated with the Atlassian product suite.
  • Documentation Management: Create and maintain technical documentation and user guides.
  • Add-On Management: Evaluate and manage the usage of Atlassian add-ons to meet team and business needs.

8. Jira Administrator Overview

  • Instance Administration: Administer JIRA instances on a day-to-day basis, including performance tuning/scaling the instances.
  • Workflow Design: Create complex JIRA workflows, including project workflows, screen schemes, permission schemes, and notification schemes in JIRA.
  • Permission Management: Grant user permission to projects according to the role given by the company.
  • Upgrade Management: Lead and provide technical assistance during major JIRA and Confluence upgrades.
  • Team Collaboration: Work closely with developers in other teams on ops projects.
  • System Maintenance: Schedule and coordinate maintenance for critical systems.
  • Best Practices: Research Atlassian best practices to implement them in Internal and Client Projects.
  • Backup Management: Be responsible for performing scheduled backups at all levels.

9. Jira Administrator Details and Accountabilities

  • Cloud Administration: Configuration, maintenance, and administration of Atlassian Cloud products (Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Desk).
  • Dashboard Reporting: Create, maintain, and support dashboards and advanced filters for end users' reporting capabilities.
  • EazyBi Reporting: Create, maintain, and support reports using the EazyBi tool and have knowledge of defining customized measures/dimensions.
  • Process Optimization: Work with development and design teams to identify procedural efficiencies, such as with Jira Workflows, custom fields, etc.
  • Tool Integration: Devise, test, and deploy integrations between Atlassian products and other internal tool chains (Azure DevOps Repo, Jenkins, etc.).
  • Employee Training: Conduct training for employees and new hires on JIRA and brief the team/s on new functionalities.
  • Add-On Management: Evaluate and manage the usage of Atlassian add-ons to meet team and business needs.
  • Innovation Research: Research and implement new approaches to Jira and Confluence usage.
  • Issue Resolution: Prompt issue resolution with JIRA Projects and Confluence in coordination with Engineering Dev/QA Managers, Scrum masters, and Atlassian support.

10. Jira Administrator Tasks

  • Jira Innovation: Drive innovation in how work is performed using Jira.
  • Project Configuration: Create custom Jira projects, complex workflows, and permission schemas.
  • Version Management: Manage Jira version upgrades.
  • Documentation Management: Create training material and standard operating procedure documentation.
  • User Training: Provide formal and informal training to Jira users.
  • Plugin Management: Identify, test, and recommend new plugins to meet project requirements.
  • Access Control: Define access permission schemas for internal and external Dropbox users.
  • Process Alignment: Align Jira with PMO processes and standards (Waterfall, Agile, and Kanban).

11. Jira Administrator Roles

  • Tool Configuration: Configure and maintain Jira/Confluence to meet evolving business needs.
  • Add-On Management: Evaluate and manage the usage of the tools' add-ons to meet team and business needs.
  • Process Optimization: Work with software teams to identify procedural efficiencies, such as with Jira workflows, custom fields, etc.
  • Status Reporting: Provide project status, progress, and potential delay information to DevOps, as well as development team Managers and team members.
  • Issue Escalation: Be a trusted support and escalation point for all tool issues.
  • Tool Training: Provide demos and training of all JIRA/Confluence Tools.
  • System Stability: Ensure systems are stable and available, and that user issues are addressed promptly.
  • Project Management: Create JIRA projects, queries, and reports.
  • Tool Enhancement: Configure, manage, and enhance Jira and Confluence tools, including native functionality, as well as researching, testing, and implementing plugins.
  • Workflow Customization: Create custom workflows, post functions, and validators, make changes to workflows, screens, fields, and reporting, and provide ongoing support and configuration maintenance.

12. Jira Administrator Additional Details

  • Project Implementation: Implement new JIRA Projects.
  • Application Management: Application administration, maintenance, and upgrades.
  • Incident Resolution: Respond to and resolve user-submitted incidents.
  • System Customization: Customization and testing (Workflows, Custom Fields, Dashboards, Reports).
  • Feature Development: Research, design, and implementation of new system features and/or plugins.
  • Documentation Management: Document system design, configuration, and user training guides.
  • User Support: Be responsible for providing Jira user and application support, analyzing problems, identifying root causes, and providing improvement and impact mitigation suggestions.
  • Requirement Analysis: Collect requirements of stakeholders, design, test, and roll out improvements.
  • User Coaching: Support in coaching JIRA users regarding best practices.
  • Tool Innovation: Help innovate the tooling landscape and improve the organization’s productivity.

13. Jira Administrator Essential Functions

  • Network Administration: Defines, designs, and administers network systems used for Project Management, Technical Development, and Test Execution.
  • Application Management: Be responsible for the initiation, configuration, and administration of enterprise applications supporting Dexcom IT execution and governance of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
  • System Configuration: Configuration and administration of JIRA, Confluence, X-Ray Test Management, Smartsheet, Valegenesis applications, and required integrations between all applications and ServiceNow.
  • System Enhancement: Proposes and implements enhancements that will improve the performance and reliability of the system.
  • Performance Analysis: First point of contact for performance analysis, scalability, and service administration issues.
  • Cross-Functional Communication: Approves action requests, communicates laterally, and engages others across the organization.
  • SDLC Alignment: Understands SDLC process requirements and is able to translate to technical configuration.
  • Technical Improvement: Continue to improve technical expertise through research and identification of new processes and technical alternatives to resolve problems and/or implement continuous improvement.

14. Jira Administrator Role Purpose

  • Atlassian Management: Manage all aspects of the Atlassian tool chain, including workflows, custom fields, schemes, add-ons, and integrations.
  • Subject Expertise: Subject matter expert for Atlassian tools (Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Jira Core).
  • Advanced Troubleshooting: Perform advanced troubleshooting tasks on Atlassian nodes, including resource utilization and stack trace analysis.
  • Project Development: Build new Jira projects and author workflows based on user requirements.
  • Tool Integration: Set up integration between Atlassian and other productivity, developer, and analytics tools.
  • Confluence Administration: Manage the Confluence environment and create spaces, pages, and page templates.
  • System Availability: Ensure system availability of all Atlassian tools based on defined SLAs.
  • Ticket Management: Handle service ticket queue to ensure timely resolution for end-user issues.
  • Deployment Support: Support for software deployment and maintenance projects.

15. Jira Administrator General Responsibilities

  • Process Engineering: Shape processes and tools that enable cross-functional collaboration and drive CI/CD transformation at VA.
  • Team Coaching: Work closely with product owners, developers, and external development teams to coach and mentor them on how to implement Jira and associated plug-ins like Portfolio, Xray, and Confluence.
  • Administrative Support: Provide administrative support for Atlassian JIRA services and JIRA-related products such as Confluence and Portfolio.
  • Training Delivery: Prepare and lead training sessions to teach valuable skills that lead toward organization-wide adoption of Jira.
  • Subject Expertise: Serve as a subject matter expert on Jira to field questions and provide hands-on support to VA product teams as they move forward with the adoption of DevOps tools and practices.
  • Workflow Development: Develop JIRA workflows, customizations, and integrations to support management on behalf of VA product teams.
  • Task Coordination: Coordinate tasks across other members of the DevSecOps team.
  • Team Leadership: Work in a fast-paced team environment and lead team activities to resolve issues and implement ad-hoc solutions.
  • Discovery Facilitation: Lead discovery sessions and consulting meetings with product teams to address their ALM needs.
  • Stakeholder Interaction: Interact with customers, team members, and upper management.

16. Jira Administrator Key Accountabilities

  • Team Coaching: Work closely with product owners, developers, and external development teams to coach and mentor them on how to implement Jira and associated plug-ins like Portfolio, Xray, and Confluence.
  • Administrative Support: Provide administrative support for Atlassian Jira services and Jira-related products such as Confluence and Portfolio.
  • Training Delivery: Prepare and lead training sessions to teach valuable skills that lead toward organization-wide adoption of Jira.
  • Subject Expertise: Serve as a subject matter expert on Jira to field questions and provide hands-on support to product teams as they move forward with the adoption of DevOps tools and practices.
  • Workflow Development: Develop Jira workflows, customizations, and integrations to support management on behalf of product teams.
  • Task Coordination: Coordinate tasks across other members of the DevSecOps team.
  • Team Leadership: Work in a fast-paced team environment and lead team activities to resolve issues and implement ad hoc solutions.
  • IT Management: Provide large-scale Information Technology and Management Services with a heavy focus on Software Development.
  • Project Delivery: Deliver quality products that are recognized throughout the technology industry, as well as successfully manage projects of both large and small scale.

17. Jira Administrator Roles and Details

  • Tool Configuration: Be responsible for the consistency, structuring, and configuration of Jira and Confluence tools.
  • Best Practices: Ensure that best practices are observed in the use and configuration of the tools that support software engineering agile processes.
  • Team Support: Work closely with software engineering teams to support and coach them in the process for using Jira and Confluence and the development lifecycle platforms.
  • Product Monitoring: Collaborate in the monitoring of the potential evolution of the products.
  • Service Improvement: Continuously improve the service offering for the Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Desk, and others).
  • Tool Recommendation: Help formulate tool and platform recommendations for the company.
  • Implementation Collaboration: Collaborate in the implementation of the evolution targets in line with the Agile Centre of Expertise.
  • Add-On Testing: Test and work with Jira add-ons, plugins, and extensions.
  • IT Coordination: Act as an interface to the IT-Service for support and troubleshooting.

18. Jira Administrator Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • Workflow Management: Set up, understand workflows, asset management, service management, and dashboards.
  • Project Setup: Set up Epics, Releases, Stories, etc.
  • Jira Administration: Serve as a Jira Administrator working to customize, configure, and implement the tool across the organization.
  • Work Coordination: Act as a coordination and facilitation point for organizing work efforts.
  • Quality Assurance: Set up or follow established procedures to ensure high quality of work.
  • Dependency Management: Understand dependency identification processes in technology work, verify information, and carefully review and check the accuracy of own work.
  • Work Prioritization: Establish or follow a prioritization process to drive work and maintain a sense of urgency about getting work completed.
  • Solution Documentation: Document and demonstrate solutions by developing documentation, flowcharts, layouts, diagrams, charts, code comments, and clear code.
  • Software Development: Develop working software and unit tests based on the solution design in the target application technology.

19. Jira Administrator Duties and Roles

  • Atlassian Expertise: Provide local subject matter expertise on all things Atlassian.
  • Project Management: Create and customize projects, support pre-existing projects, and nurture a healthy culture of best-practice Jira usage.
  • System Improvement: Advise the business while taking a hands-on approach to implementing necessary systems improvements, platform migrations, and upgrades.
  • Team Mentorship: Provide mentorship and internal training on Atlassian and agile skills.
  • Data Analysis: Identify trends and problem areas using data-driven approaches and use metrics to identify focus areas for prioritization with the end goal of improving the internal infrastructure and efficiency of the workforce.
  • System Stability: Ensure the internal systems are stable and consistently available.
  • Configuration Support: Support configuration activities, planned outages, etc.
  • Plugin Research: Work with plug-ins and conduct R&D on JIRA/Confluence plug-ins.
  • Technical Documentation: Document technical configurations and support the development of business plans for technical integration.

20. Jira Administrator Accountabilities

  • Scrum Enablement: Launch, champion, cater, and support sustained SCRUM practices across all non-technical teams in the organization.
  • Project Administration: Maintain and manage project settings, boards, workflows, tasks/issues, permissions, and users, including setting permissions and maintaining security for JIRA projects and Confluence spaces independently without supervision.
  • Dashboard Enhancement: Advance JIRA filters, reporting, dashboards, workflows, and fields to be more user-friendly and visually appealing, increasing adherence with stakeholders.
  • Process Support: Support various departments in implementation, process improvement, and execution via documentation creation, training material creation, and process manual additions and improvements.
  • Risk Management: Proactively identify and address implementation risks through proper escalation and engagement of the appropriate teams in creative solutions.
  • Stakeholder Support: Complete special projects to support key stakeholders.
  • Workflow Automation: Develop, maintain, and manage Jira projects involving automation workflows, including customizations, validations, conditions, and post functions, etc.
  • Configuration Management: Maintain different screens and notification schemes related to configurations on Jira.
  • Requirement Gathering: Gather requirements to develop and deliver custom templates and workflows (automation) by collaborating with dynamic teams.
  • Records Administration: Manage records of the architecture setup and functionality, along with administrative duties.
  • Process Improvement: Recommend modifications to processes and procedures, and contribute to best practices, architecture, and implementations.
  • Multitasking Management: Work in a fast-paced environment with multiple competing priorities.