I once watched an admin build the same Jira project four times in one week. Same workflow, same fields, same permission scheme, same three boards — typed out by hand each time, like a scribe copying a manuscript by candlelight. By Thursday he had a fifth request in the queue and the faintly haunted expression of a man who has glimpsed his own future. There's a better way, and it's been sitting in the Create dialog the whole time.

Welcome back. In part one we untangled the projects-to-spaces rename and stood up a first space. Today is the part that actually buys back your time: how to stop building every space from scratch. Templates, shared configuration, and a custom-template trick that quietly turns space creation from a bottleneck into a self-serve system.

Templates: your running start

Every time you create a space, Jira hands you a library of templates, organized two ways: by use case and by app. The use-case view groups them around what a team is trying to do — Scrum and Kanban for software teams, simple task tracking for lightweight work, and ready-made starting points for business teams in marketing, HR, and legal. The app view groups them by product, so if you run Jira Service Management you'll find IT service desk and customer service desk templates waiting there.

One detail that matters: the templates you see depend on the Jira apps you're subscribed to. No Jira Service Management subscription, no service desk templates. And here's a small gotcha worth knowing before you click — if you pick a template tied to an app you don't currently have access to, Jira shows a checkbox offering to grant yourself access. Tick it and you're added to that app's default group, which means you now count as a licensed user of it. Handy when you meant to do that; an unwelcome surprise on the invoice when you didn't. Read the checkbox.

Shared configuration: borrow from a space you already trust

Templates are a great starting point, but they're generic. The real time-saver is shared configuration — creating a new space that inherits its setup from an existing one. As you create the space, you can choose to share settings with a space you've already built, pulling in its permissions, workflows, work types, and other schemes rather than reconstructing them click by click.

This is the move for organizations that want every team's space to look and behave the same way. Build one space properly — the permission scheme your security team signed off on, the workflow your auditors like, the fields your reporting depends on — and every space spun up from it starts life already compliant. Consistency stops being something you enforce after the fact and becomes something you get for free at creation.

Custom templates: turn your best space into a blueprint

Here's the trick I wish more teams knew about. Once you've built a space that genuinely works — the one other teams keep asking to copy — you can save it as a reusable template. From that space, head to Space settings → Details, open More actions, and choose Save as space template. Give it a clear name and a description so teams know when and why to reach for it, and it joins the template gallery alongside Atlassian's built-in options.

That's how you bottle institutional knowledge. Your "golden" software space, your standard service desk, your marketing-intake setup — each becomes a one-click starting point instead of a tribal recipe only one admin remembers. And because the template carries the configuration, the next team doesn't just get a similar-looking space; they get the actual, considered setup you worked out the hard way.

Self-serve, but governed

The piece that makes this genuinely scalable arrived for Enterprise customers earlier this year: admins can now choose exactly who is allowed to create spaces from a given custom template. Open the template, select who can create new spaces from it, and grant access to specific users or groups. Now your teams can self-serve a perfectly configured space without filing a ticket — and without the free-for-all that usually makes admins nervous about self-service in the first place.

One important boundary to keep straight: that access controls space creation only. It decides who can spin up a space from the template; it does not set the permissions inside the resulting spaces. Those you still configure separately, per space. Conflating the two is a classic way to accidentally hand out more access than you intended, so keep the line bright in your head.

A note on the two space types

All of this interacts with the company-managed versus team-managed choice we met in part one. Company-managed spaces are where shared schemes live, so they're the natural home for the "build once, reuse everywhere" pattern when central consistency is the goal. Team-managed spaces travel with their own self-contained configuration, which is exactly what makes them fast and autonomous — and worth templating too, so even your independent teams start from a sensible baseline rather than a blank slate. And if you're arriving from another tool entirely, remember you can import a space and its work items during creation, so a migration doesn't mean rebuilding history by hand.

The Avaratak Take

Treat templates as products, not afterthoughts. The teams who win here pick their two or three most-requested space types, build a deliberately excellent version of each, save them as named custom templates, and write a one-line description so the right people reach for the right blueprint. Then they decide — on purpose — who's allowed to self-serve which template. That combination is the whole game: consistency without bottlenecks, autonomy without anarchy.

The number to watch is how many one-off "can you set up a space for us" tickets land in your admins' queue each month. Done well, that number falls toward zero, your admins get their Thursdays back, and the spaces that do get created are more consistent than the hand-built ones ever were. That's the rare improvement that makes both the governance crowd and the move-fast crowd happy at once.

In part three, we close the series with the grown-up stuff: who's allowed to create what, how space categories give you visibility across a sprawling estate, and how to keep Jira spaces, Confluence spaces, and Atlassian Projects from turning every access request into a guessing game.

If you'd like help designing a set of golden space templates your teams will actually use — and a governance model that decides who gets to use them — that's squarely the work we do as an Atlassian Solution Partner at Avaratak Consulting. Find us at avaratak.com.