As part of completing the rollout plan included in the Atlassian Cloud Adoption Toolkit, one Jira Software and Confluence migration customer (Enterprise edition) recently defined the success of their actual migration in the following way:
Success will be measured against three main criteria:
- Ability to implement and migrate to Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud with minimal disruption to engagement teams and their clients
- Achievement of the majority of expected benefits associated with productivity gains and cost avoidance outlined in our business case
- Delivery of the full scope of the transition to Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud on schedule within the allocated budget
Minimal Disruption
The importance of minimizing disruption relates to several different areas. Most notably, it will be critical to ensure that there is no data loss as a result of migrating existing projects from Data Center to Cloud. However, success will also be determined by our ability to provide users of both new and in-flight projects with the information and support required to enable their transition to Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud. This will require effective communications, training, and support prior to, during, and post-Go Live. In essence, were they able to continue business as usual (BAU) as much as possible given the change.
Productivity Gains / Cost Avoidance
The productivity gains outlined in the business case specifically relate to the modern, more intuitive user interface (UI) to speed adoption and limit learning curves, and unlock new functionality only available in the Cloud platform. A recent Forrester study found that organizations that migrated from Jira Data Center to Jira Cloud realized 20% productivity gains (note: we conservatively projected a 10% improvement in productivity for our “power user” community).
- Efficiency by end users will also be enhanced due to plugins/integrations, specifically an easily accessible native mobile app, and integrations with Microsoft Teams and Outlook to reduce switching costs. Our users will also benefit from reduced application downtime since the Jira Cloud product hosted by Atlassian provides 99.95% (note: this SLA is for Enterprise edition) reliability and availability that is financially-backed contractually. Lastly, the connection to the Atlassian Data Lake (note: this is a feature of Enterprise edition) will provide further benefits, with enhanced native reporting and connections to data visualization tools, such as Power BI and Tableau, without the need for plugins.
- In relation to cost avoidance, by transitioning to Cloud we will eliminate a majority, if not all, of our infrastructure and support required to maintain Jira and Confluence Data Center infrastructure as that burden shifts to Atlassian. We not only eliminate the current costs of hardware and infrastructure support, but also avoid future increases in those costs that would have been incurred as we scale over time.
- Although Jira and Confluence Cloud licenses and plugins are more expensive than the Data Center counterparts, we will no longer incur costs associated with the Data Center licenses (i.e., the incremental cost of Cloud licenses will be partially offset by the elimination of Data Center licenses). We will also avoid costs associated with a number of plugins that are no longer required moving forward because those capabilities are included in the Cloud products. Lastly, we will experience a slight decrease in support costs as Premier Support is included in all Enterprise Cloud agreements.
Scope, Schedule, and Budget
The final success metric will simply determine if we are able to deliver the entirety of our original scope, on or ahead of schedule, within the original budget that was allocated for the migration. This project scope will include the configuration and setup of the new Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud sites, migration of select projects and spaces from Data Center, all organizational change management-related activities, and implementation of our new support model.
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