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This is a complex one for my current employer because we're an Atlassian partner, and hence have a swathe of Jira systems and are helping out with a much much larger swathe of other people's Jiras. We are looking after Jira systems ranging from free to tens of thousands of users (there's about 900 Adaptavists, but a good chunk of us are just "customers" using JSM. At the other end of the scale, we've got consultants who are expert Jira admins and are the ones doing the design, build, and maintenance, of many Jira systems, as well as upgrades and migrations)
There is a noticeable pattern though, which hasn't changed. I spent 10 years working with Atlassian systems before I joined Adaptavist, and everywhere I worked had a similar model. They all had a "product owner" who is nominally responsible for most, if not all, of the developer's toolsets.
They would be in a position where they don't have time to do the admin, and usually not have the skill set either (nor the time to learn) as their job was to enable others to get stuff done. So they would hire people to do the day-to-day admin or to do projects like upgrades and migrations for them.
Pre-adaptavist, my main employers had product owners who hired me to look after their Jiras as:
- James ran the "Environments team" at a large energy company. His team built and maintained all of their development and test systems
- Julian ran many teams, but one of them was a team dedicated to running Jira and Confluence for all of a large bank supporting almost all of their knowledge management
- Phil was the founder of a startup doing pure development of new software
- Amanda ran the technical authoring team for a large media company, who rely on Confluence, and inherited Jira admin duties because they're both Atlassian
Since joining Adaptavist, I've seen hundreds more systems, and most of them follow that pattern - there's a product owner who has overall responsibility, as part of a suite of applications that help people get stuff done, and they tend to delegate admin and maintenance to someone with more time and focus. The product owner's job is very varied, but they usually have much more to think about than just the Atlassian applications the organisation is using. They are usually the ones to make the big decisions about what happens with the product, but they delegate the smaller stuff to the best judgement of the administrators they have hired.
There's no clear pattern for change. At one end of the scale, you get organisations redesigning everything they are doing (for example, transforming to a scaled Agile way of working), and at the other, you're getting individual teams or even individuals coming to your admins and asking for something that would help them work more effectively.
I tend to set up a Jira project to track requests for changes to Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, and let the requests in there inform the admins when people are asking for things that need to go to the product owner, or above.
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