Jira Admin v. Project Admin

[Chad Atkinson]

I'm preparing to take the Project Administration in Jira Server certification exam.  It looks heavily based on the differences between the abilities of the Jira Administrator and the Project Administrator.  I've searched thoroughly, attempting to find a detailed list of the differences in their roles/responsibilities.  I've found some information from a question from 2015, I understand that with the updated versions that responsibilities have changed some.  Is there any comprehensive list of tasks that project admins can perform vs. what a Jira Admin can do?

TL:DR - Tasks that can be performed by a Jira Admin's vs. Project Admins.

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hi Chad,

To prep for your test some really good bits of information to look at for the project level administration can be seen in the Release notes for Jira 7.3 and 7.4 when the project level administrations was initially released:

• 7.3.x release notes
• 7.4.x release notes

As well as the following Feature Request where we are tracking feedback on the currently functionality to get ideas for future improvements, with various levels of discussions in the comments about the current behavior:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-65574

Then the varying levels of permissions go pretty deep on multiple levels, so there are a few areas that you should focus on,  the Documentation to review for the permissions can be found at the following links:

• Managing project permissions
  • Look under the section "Extended project administration"
• Workflows
  • Look at the section "Project administrators"
• Managing project roles
  • This is how project admins affect what users have permissions in the project

But one of the main take aways of the Project level administrator vs the Jira Administrators is that a project level Admin can only make changes that affect the direct project, and cannot alter anything that is a global object, i.e. something that is shared or can be shared with other projects. 

As an example, when editing a workflow a Project level admin can add existing statuses to a workflow, but the Status is a global object that can be used across any project therefore it cannot be changed or new ones create by project level admins, and it would require reaching out to the Jira Admin to perform these global level actions.

Regards,
Earl