At Valiantys, we provide expert services to ensure that you’re using the best Atlassian tools at their full potential.
We recently partnered with a healthcare company in the United States to streamline their processes, optimize their use of Jira and migrate to the Cloud. The company’s Jira server instance was outdated. They were using many different workflows for overlapping purposes and faced challenges keeping many third-party integrations up to date and in sync, resulting in a disorganized release process and inflated costs.
The backbone of solving their workflow and integration challenges was to design and deploy a full migration to Atlassian Cloud.
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Doing more with Jira
Jira is a powerful tool with vast capabilities for project management and tracking. It works best when integrated with other tools to create streamlined workflows drawing on data sources relevant to the project, and Jira Cloud comes loaded with new features to support that. But the migration requires some serious analysis and preparation. Valiantys helped this American healthcare company do just that. In the following sections, we will describe how.
Identifying Problems
Managing projects and workflows becomes challenging without the standardization and governance of tools used across varying teams.
Valiantys identified this common issue as the healthcare company’s core problem. A lack of standardization and governance around diverse tools used across many teams can create difficulties in tracking and managing projects. This made it difficult for the organization to predict the time it would take to complete project workstreams. The remedy to this problem was to look for opportunities to streamline and standardize workflows and leverage Jira Cloud new features.
Before partnering with Valiantys, the healthcare company was relying on an old Jira Server instance with more than 1,000 users and some complex workflows used mainly by product teams. At that time, they weren’t using Jira fully, and there was no integration between Jira and Bitbucket, which was being used as a version control system. This situation complicated their release process and introduced risk factors that frequently caused delays.
Additionally, the company was using ServiceNow as their main IT service management solution for both internal tickets and external customer support requests. They received around 100 tickets per month, and the lack of integration between Jira and ServiceNow caused further inefficiency.
The disconnect between the issues raised as tickets and the work packages tracked in Jira Software to resolve them, was creating an administrative barrier between problem identification and solution. This made it challenging for the company to respond to issues from end to end.
The Valiantys Solution
After identifying the healthcare company’s core issues, Valiantys worked closely with their leadership team to prioritize the best solutions.
Initially, the company sought Valiantys’ guidance for moving to Atlassian Data Center and improving some of their main workflows. But conversations revealed a significant opportunity, with Jira Cloud features and capabilities. We worked together on a Cloud Migration Readiness Assessment and designed a solution for them to migrate entirely to the Cloud, leading to significant benefits and substantial cost savings which were not achievable with Data Center.
Initial reluctance for the Cloud solution was based on concerns about data privacy, as the organization’s Jira tickets may have stored sensitive patient health information (PHI). However, Atlassian’s Cloud products had recently become HIPAA compliant, which totally alleviated this concern. Furthermore, Valiantys designed the migration process to meet all compliance requirements so that no critical data would be at risk.
Reassured by these security measures, the healthcare company was ready to begin its migration to Atlassian Cloud. It was a three-part, eight-month process — but extremely rewarding.
After identifying the healthcare company’s core issues, Valiantys worked closely with their leadership team to prioritize the best solutions.
Phase 1: Migrating Data and streamlining processes
After conducting multiple meetings with the stakeholders to design new, custom processes for their product teams, Valiantys commenced the project’s first phase.
This four-month phase involved, first migrating data into the target environment on Atlassian Cloud. Upon completing the migration, we implemented standardized project processes.
Phase 2: Integrating ITSM on Atlassian Tools
For the next two months, Valiantys supported the healthcare company in migrating from ServiceNow to Atlassian Cloud’s Jira Service Management (JSM). Migrating from ServiceNow to JSM offers improved flexibility, a simpler licensing model, and ease of customization. Valiantys configured Jira Service Management to tailor it to the specific needs of the company.
We also built a user-friendly self-service portal for the healthcare company and integrated Confluence to manage their knowledge base. Confluence allowed the company’s team members to easily create, share, and organize content in one central location, increasing productivity and knowledge-sharing. Valiantys leveraged the customizable templates and macros in Confluence to streamline their workflows and improve consistency across documentation. Because this platform also features advanced search and permission controls, the company’s teams could easily find and share information while maintaining data security.
To ensure a successful transition, Valiantys delivered comprehensive training on these new tools to their service desk agents. This increased their competence and confidence levels leading up to and following the migration.
Phase 3: Enabling Seamless Connections
A major benefit of the Atlassian Cloud is that it natively enables seamless integration between Atlassian products.
In the final, two-month phase, Valiantys migrated Bitbucket from server to Cloud and integrated it with Jira for seamless issue tracking and project management. Valiantys also introduced release management for Jira into the healthcare company’s processes.
Getting Results
The healthcare company’s migration investment in Atlassian Cloud secured a significant ROI within the first year. During that year, they spent $450,000 on the migration and achieved savings of $935,000. Three years after that, the total amount saved will exceed $1.5 million.
The migration’s most significant impact on cost savings was the reduction of resources that the company needed to support customizations for their existing processes. By reducing the number of customized workflows from 60 to 5, the healthcare company saved a significant amount of time and resources. This is something that simply cannot be done with server instances of Atlassian tools. The reduction in customizations alone saved over 1,000 workdays per year.
And due to the enhanced self-serve capabilities of Jira Service Management, compared to the previous tool, the number of support tickets was also reduced, resulting in an additional savings of 200 workdays per year.
As with all Server to Cloud migrations, all costs associated with owning, running, and maintaining hardware were alleviated. And although Cloud licenses usually cost more than server licenses, the healthcare company also saved by decreasing the number of licenses they were paying for from 2000 to 750, which automatically put them in a lower price tier.
In addition to these savings, and more importantly, the healthcare company benefited from smoother, simpler, and more connected workflows, and a far easier to use, integrated system for their day-to-day work. This made their work more efficient, enjoyable, and easier to analyze.
In Summary
In less than a year, Valiantys transformed the healthcare company’s practices. We helped them create more cohesion between teams, readied access to shared knowledge resources, and created a more user-friendly solution that remains secure and compliant with stringent healthcare regulations. By migrating to the Atlassian Cloud, the organization can access the latest Jira features, use off-the-shelf integration – while gaining a high-availability system with more straightforward licensing, lower maintenance costs, and reduced business risk. This comprehensive approach resulted in a doubled return on investment that same year.
Valiantys’ cloud migration services are designed to meet the unique needs of businesses of all sizes and industries. Whether you’re just getting started with project management or looking to optimize your existing processes, Valiantys offers a range of services to help.
