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.