When was the last time your Atlassian environment had a health check?

[Pallab_Empyra_com]

As organizations evolve, so do their Atlassian environments.

New teams are onboarded, workflows are refined, Marketplace apps are introduced, and automations are added to support changing business needs. These changes happen gradually, often over months or even years.

The question is:

Is your Atlassian environment evolving as efficiently as your business?

A regular Atlassian Health Check isn't just about identifying technical issues. It's about understanding whether your platform is still delivering the value it was designed to provide.

It's an opportunity to ask questions like:

• Are our workflows still aligned with how our teams work today?
• Are our projects and configurations easy to manage as we scale?
• Are we getting the most value from our Marketplace apps and automations?
• Have our permissions and governance kept pace with organizational changes?
• Are there opportunities to simplify administration and improve the user experience?

Over time, even small inefficiencies can add up. A periodic review helps identify opportunities to optimize your Atlassian environment before those issues begin affecting productivity, governance, or adoption.

A question for the community

Does your organization conduct regular health checks of its Atlassian environment?

If yes, what areas do you typically review? If not, what usually triggers a review?

Disclosure: I work with Empyra, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner. One thing we've consistently seen while working with enterprise organizations is that proactive Atlassian Health Checks often uncover straightforward improvements that strengthen governance, streamline administration, and help teams get even more value from their Atlassian investment.

I'd love to hear how your organization approaches platform optimization and continuous improvement.

[Gabriel Roth]

This is a really good question. I suspect the answer to this is question is "not very often, if ever". The last 3 bullets are the ones I'm most interested in personally. Dollars spent on apps we aren't really using, permissions bloat, and streamlining/simplification are all super important for me.

Probably time I start doing some digging :)

[Pallab_Empyra_com]

@Gabriel Roth  That's exactly what makes health checks interesting, they're rarely about finding something broken, they're about uncovering all the little things that quietly accumulate over time.

I'm curious... if you had to start with just one area, would it be apps, permissions, or workflow simplification? Which one do you think delivers the quickest win?

[Gabriel Roth]

Well, we don't use that many apps, so we aren't spending that much on them really and workflow simplification is a pipe dream around my org, so likely permissions. We seem to experience permission bloat quite a lot. Small grants over time till we find a handful of users that are basically wholly unqualified app admins in 50% of the project spaces.

[Peter Kerrigan]

Hope you don't mind a long winded comment on this one 😅  really digging into my Partner past here.

Based on what I've seen, very few orgs run health checks on a dedicated cadence.

In my experience there is a huge amount of variability in how environments are managed. Very generally I'd classify them into the following categories:

1. Iron Fist - admins set up a couple templates that all teams are expected to use.
2. Flexible with strong governance - a good admin team capable of fielding new configuration requests and determining what is and isn't acceptable to configure.
3. Wild West - Little control is maintained across the org. Not usually anyone's fault; more a result of shadow IT, M&A, or too many admins with no shared process for governance or approvals.

Each situation has its pros and cons.

1. Iron fist looks good on the surface but can lead to frustrated users and a lack of adoption if certain processes and requirements aren't supported. Health checks are theoretically easy here...but there's not much to check when everyone is forced into 2-3 templates. Maybe check the mental health of frustrated users 😵‍💫
2. Goldilocks zone that few orgs achieve in full. I believe these ones would benefit massively from regular health checks. The effort required would likely be quite low but would scale with org size. While nothing may appear wrong on the surface, small issues or unused/unnecessary platform configs (broken automations, unused or duplicate fields, etc.) can still slip through the cracks. Frequent health checks are what keep these orgs in the Goldilocks zone. Without them, given enough time, they may risk drifting into category 3.
3. Wild West...health checks are a dream. First step is to get control. Setting up the support structures like a CAB and governance processes, cleanup and consolidation, and assessing what teams actually need from the platform are all necessary before health checks begin. Ideally the org (perhaps with the support of an Atlassian Partner) works through cleanup and consolidation first, then builds toward a long-term solution, which usually means cadenced health checks.

Anyhow, I don't know if I've answered your exact question yet, so here it goes:

What triggers a health check in my mind?

• An org needs a method to track the health signals that are important to them. I've seen orgs write custom scripts, others using a third-party app that monitors environment health. Signals could flag inactive projects, unused fields, overly complex workflows, whatever metrics that org has deemed important to their environment health. Those signals need thresholds that, if exceeded, would trigger a report/notification and indicate the need for a health check. 
• I'd start by monitoring the more impactful areas. In Jira specifically, that's usually complex workflows, unused/duplicate fields, complex screens, and broken automations as some of the more impactful config types. When these aren't working properly, users start building workarounds. Workarounds lead to bad data, which leads to unclear outcomes, which leads to organizational confusion.

So yeah...health checks probably don't happen as often as they should (if ever) for most orgs. Atlassian tools are becoming deeply embedded in how orgs operate, and if the environments underneath aren't functional, that creates a lot of downstream pain.

[Pallab_Empyra_com]

The "Goldilocks zone" is probably where every admin thinks they are 😄

Then someone discovers 400 custom fields, five versions of the same workflow, and an automation that's been failing quietly for six months.

Really enjoyed reading your take.

[Gabriel Roth]

We went form Wild West to Iron Fist and landed, sort of, in Goldilocks Zone. But that's the exact scenario we fond ourselves in... duplicated workflows, unnecessary custom fields, silently failing automations... and the clean-up is a herculean effort.