Jira Work management to Jira software management

[Youmna Alomari]

When migrating from Jira Work Management to Jira Software, is there a risk of encountering broken links or losing tickets from my board?

Thank you.

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Youmna - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

If you have any Components or Releases on the Jira Work Management (JWM) project, then you need to create those same things in the Jira Software (JSW) project before you migrate. 

The Links and all of that should work fine. Depending on how your board was setup you might have to adjust your filter in the JSW project, but I doubt it. 

Finally, if you are using any custom fields that have a context with the JWM project, you would need to add the JSW project to the context. 

All of this is assuming both are Company-managed projects. If not, let us know. 

[Youmna Alomari]

The Work management project that I'm migrating from is team managed and the Jira software project is company managed. Could you please advise on what steps to take if the configuration of my new Jira Software project doesn't align with the previous Work Management project? I'm concerned about the potential loss of tickets or have my clients encounter broken links after the migration process. 

Thank you!

[Youmna Alomari]

I also noticed an option for bulk cloning many issues at once (Deep Clone for Jira). Would this option be helpful in my case? Can I bulk clone issues and send them to another project? Just to keep a copy of what I have. 

Thank you! 

[John Funk]

Deep Clone is a wonderful tool, but you should check with them directly to see if this is a scenario they would suggest. 

After you do all of the items I mention above, you will need to create Custom Fields with the same Type and Name if they don't already exist for Company-managed projects. 

You will also need to create all of the same schemes in advance  - workflows, screens, issue types, etc. 

After you do all of that, do a Move of one issue in the Team-managed to the Company-managed and see how well it does as a test. 

[Youmna Alomari]

Thank you for the clarification. That was helpful!

[John Funk]

Great! Glad I was able to help.

[Youmna Alomari]

Do you know if I should implement a freeze during the migration process to ensure that no information is lost or disrupted? and for how long?

There are a lot of ticket updates and we don’t want to unintentionally disrupt any work.

Thank you! 

[John Funk]

I always run the migration after hours just so there’s no conflict there. Or if I know for sure, no one is working on the project at the time I run the migration.

[Youmna Alomari]

Awesome! 

One more question: If I create the Jira Software project that I will migrate my contents to and configure the project to share settings with an existing project, will I need to recreate the custom fields for my current Work Management project if they already exist in the new Jira Software project that I created?

[John Funk]

Since it is Team-managed project, you will need to create the Custom Fields in the shared configuration for Company-managed projects. Go to Settings > Issues > Custom fields. But search for the field first to make sure it is not already there. 

[Youmna Alomari]

Thank you so much! 

[John Funk]

You are welcome!

[Youmna Alomari]

Hi John, 

If the source project I'm migrating from ( team-managed) doesn't have rules, automation, or workflows in its settings, but the destination project (company-managed) does, will this cause an issue during migration? 

Thank you! 

[John Funk]

Well, your Team-managed project most certainly already has a workflow associated with it. You will need to make sure those line up between the two projects or know how you will map the existing statuses to the new statuses in the destination workflow. 

The rest should not cause major problems. 

[Youmna Alomari]

Another question to raise here: If I change the project Key in my destination project to somewhat match the previous one, will that also cause any problems? I tried to do that, but once I saw the alert message, I held off on that.

[John Funk]

Typically this is okay to do as long as you don't have a lot of connections to third party tools like GitHub/GitLab, etc. How many issues are in the project? 

[Youmna Alomari]

Sorry, I didn't notice your comment. I have 110 issues in my project. :)

[John Funk]

You should be fine.