Simple questions - complicated answers. Rolling out Jira over multiple countries - non-technical

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey all,

As part of the global rollout of our Atlassian environment (in use for 12000+ users through offices in over 100 countries) we've faced obvious technical challenges due to the scale and complexity of our business structure, but some big sticking points have come from unexpected areas - basic definitions that you often take for granted and when it comes to a system like Jira where some settings are system wide, deciding which one you'll go with when that choice being right or wrong depends on where your users are can cause often heated discussions and possibly even challenge usage.

• When is the weekend? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#Around_the_world
  • Saturday/Sunday
  • Friday/Saturday
  • Friday + Sunday (Brunei)
  • Friday only
  • + more combinations
• What is the first day of the  week?
  • It depends on when your weekends are, but even when the weekend is Saturday/Sunday, some countries will have the first day of the week as Sunday, others Monday
• When is 04/07/2018? 7th April or 4th July?
  • Based on your date format being mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy a date like this is ambiguous. While 07/25/2018 can only be seen one way, at a glance, users should know what the date is regardless of who entered it and who's reading it. This makes a format like dd/MMM/yyyy (26 Jun 2018) unambiguous
• Less surprising is spelling variations (often impacts 
  
  • Color / Colour
  • Prioritise / Prioritize
  • Finalise / Finalize
  • Localize / Localise

Thought it might be worthwhile to other users who are starting in one location but may expect their usage to grow to pool together a list of other system wide decisions that need to be made and could impact use down the track.

What else have you needed to decide on knowing that a % of your users will have to change their default behavior/behaviour?

How have you decided which one to use?

CCM