Someone left. IT deactivated their Atlassian account and closed the ticket. In Jira, nothing changed: they are still assignee, owner and lead on everything they touched. Here is the full manual checklist an admin actually follows, with honest time estimates, and a note at the end on automating it.
Deactivation does exactly two things: it blocks login and frees the license seat. Everything the person owned stays owned.
After deactivation, the leaver remains:
This is not an oversight you can toggle off. Atlassian has tracked the request to reassign a user's work when their account is removed as JRACLOUD-2073. It was opened in 2003 and is still open. Until it is resolved, offboarding the work is a separate job from offboarding the account, and it is a job someone has to do by hand.
Eight steps, in the order that avoids rework. Time estimates assume one leaver of ordinary tenure on a site with a few dozen projects. Long-tenured leavers and large sites run longer.
Find everything still assigned to them and not yet done:
assignee = "leaver" AND statusCategory != Done ORDER BY project
Go to Jira Settings → System → Shared filters, search by owner, and change the owner of each filter, one at a time.
Go to Jira Settings → System → Shared dashboards, search by owner, and use Change owner on each dashboard, one at a time.
This is the slowest step, because Jira's UI has no cross-project search for "every component this person leads." You walk every project: Project settings → Components, scan the lead column, change each one.
Easier than components: the admin Projects list shows the lead for every project, so scan it for the leaver and update Project settings → Details on each hit.
Before the account is removed from your directory, open admin.atlassian.com → Directory → Users and record every group the person belonged to. Screenshot it, export it, paste it into the leaver ticket: anything permanent.
If the leaver was a Jira Service Management agent, their service desk issues need an agent as successor. Assigning a JSM issue to someone without an agent license fails.
The step most often skipped, and the one an auditor or security reviewer will actually ask about: who took over this person's work and access, who made the transfer, and when.
The whole job on one screen. Copy it into your leaver ticket template.
assignee = "leaver" AND statusCategory != Done), batches of 1,000, comment for contextWe built Handover for Jira because we got tired of doing the list above by hand. It runs the same checklist, on Atlassian's own infrastructure, and writes the evidence as it goes.
One read-only scan finds the open issues, saved filters including private ones, dashboards, component leads and project leads. You assign successors, preview every change, and the transfers run in resumable batches, up to 5,000 issues per run.
Dashboards transfer automatically through Atlassian's bulk API and every result is verified by reading the dashboard back. Anything Jira blocks becomes a guided step with Retry as me and Mark done, recorded in the audit. A dashboard the leaver never shared is invisible to every Jira API, for us and for everyone, so those stay a manual review on the Shared dashboards page.
Group memberships are snapshotted into the audit automatically. Re-grants run per group, as you, the clicking org admin, at the moment you click. Handover never stores admin credentials and cannot touch groups in the background.
Every run produces a permanent audit record: who ran it, when, every item, every outcome, exportable as CSV. The evidence step stops being a step.
Two things Handover deliberately does not do: it does not deactivate accounts, because your existing user management handles that half of the job well, and it does not touch closed issues, because finished work should keep its history. Run Handover first, then deactivate with the tool you already use.
It runs entirely on Atlassian infrastructure with zero data egress, is free for teams of 10 or fewer users, and costs $1.25 per user per month above that, with a 30 day free trial billed through your existing Atlassian invoice.
No. Deactivation blocks login and frees the license seat, nothing more. The person stays assignee on every open issue and owner of every filter and dashboard, and remains component and project lead wherever they were. Atlassian has tracked the request to change this as JRACLOUD-2073 since 2003, and it is still open.
Private filters, yes: Jira Cloud lets site admins surface them and change their owner from the Shared filters admin page. Dashboards are different: no Jira API can list a dashboard the leaver never shared with anyone. Site admins can review those by hand under Jira Settings → System → Shared dashboards.
Done properly, two to five hours per leaver. Most of it is hunting rather than transferring: components across every project, private filters, unshared dashboards, and then writing the evidence down.
Ownership transfers work the same on active and deactivated accounts, so either order works for most of the checklist. The one thing to capture early is the group membership list: record it before the account is removed from your directory, because it is your evidence of what the person could access on their last day.
Handover runs this whole checklist as one audited pass: scan, assign successors, execute, export the evidence.
Get Handover for JiraFree for 10 or fewer users · $1.25 per user per month above that · 30 day free trial