Think back to this time last year. How much has your organization changed? You may have gained new team members, while some employees transitioned into new roles or moved on to other companies. Perhaps today, your team collaborates differently with other departments based on current projects, or maybe your company has adopted more technology to support employees at work.
Change is constant at any organization: Users will come and go, permissions will need to be updated, custom workflows can become obsolete. That’s why it’s critical that workplace technologies — tools designed to help employees collaborate, manage projects, assign and execute tasks — are flexible enough to change along with companies' people and priorities.
Atlassian’s Jira platform was designed to improve organizational efficiency: teams across an entire organization, from software development to customer support, can easily plan, track, assign and report on their work in Jira. For instance, Jira Core enables teams to track issues, build projects and workflows, while Jira Service Management allows users to layer projects with customer portals to manage incoming requests, and Jira Software comes equipped with Scrum and Kanban boards, supporting Agile development. But in order to maximize the benefits of the platform, organizations need to maintain a clean Jira environment.
To help keep Jira functioning at its best, teams should look to stay ahead of roadblocks that can lead to patchwork, unwieldy Jira instances. Teams can start by only keeping the data they need, carefully constructing their workflows, and utilizing helpful add-ons — and an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner such as Contegix can support teams with hands-on guidance along the way.
As employees come and go, Jira system permissions will need to change to allow new users to access the platform and remove access from former employees. Without quickly updating permissions or retiring outdated user data, teams run the risk of an unnecessarily crowded system that can operate more slowly as a result.
While the process of updating user information and permissions is simple to execute on a small scale, a whopping 4 million employees left their job every month over the last year in the U.S. alone. By automating access permissions, teams can quickly keep their systems up-to-date and operating quickly, especially as employees enter and exit the organization at scale. By working with an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner like Contegix, teams can automate permissions by project or groups of users, collaborating on the techniques that make sense for their organization
Additionally, marketplace apps such as Access Management for Jira were designed to help users automate access permissions, from creating users to editing groups and project roles.
Overly complicated workflows can also play a part in slowing down an organization's Jira application, and make it difficult for users to access the data they need for crucial tasks such as reporting. If several departments each add their own unique customizations or create multiple locations to submit issue tickets in Jira Service Management, for example, users can overrun the system and ultimately negatively impact its performance. To avoid this outcome, teams can routinely evaluate their platform to make sure it continually serves their organization and get ahead of necessary changes before outdated workflows start to make a negative impact.
Mortgage lending company NewRez, for example, partnered with Contegix to overhaul its Jira Service Management platform. Contegix diagnosed an overuse of custom fields, which made sense at one point but no longer served the same purpose, along with missing input fields for key information. Ultimately, the system configuration was preventing optimal performance. Contegix worked with the team to add multiple qualifiers when users submit a request, which gave NewRez better visibility into what issues needed to be resolved, and the ability to act on those issues faster.
If Jira operates slower than usual, it might be time to work with an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner like Contegix to reevaluate your setup. Or if a team is failing to meet its KPIs or efficiency standards, it may indicate that their systems no longer support their workflow. Contegix’s team of experts can evaluate the system to find data that can be retired, or suggest new workflow configurations for improvement.
Whether a company is interested in transitioning to Atlassian’s Jira platforms or has used the application for years, working with a Platinum Solutions Partner can help teams understand how their platform can work better for their organization, no matter what stage the company is at or the changes it's currently experiencing.
Learn how Contegix can support your organization and optimize Jira across departments.