👋 Hey there! I’m Kim with Atlassian Customer Success. We’re here to help you succeed with Atlassian products like Jira. Our subject for today – instance hygiene. 🛀
If you and your team have been using Jira for over a year, we recommend running an instance clean up project. A cleanup is also great for instances recently migrated to Jira Cloud that weren’t cleaned up prior to the migration.
Running a Jira instance cleanup improves productivity, reduces the time to find what you’re looking for and enhances the user experience.
Ready to get started? Check out this guide to cleaning up your Jira instance and eliminate redundancies⤵
Before you start the actual cleanup, there are a few things you should do to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Limit the number of admins involved in the project. We recommend more than 2 but fewer than 5. This isn’t a scenario where “the more the merrier” applies. 😉
Change starts with awareness. Before you can effectively clean up your instance, you’ll want to take inventory of what it looks like today. Below are areas we recommend you review and how to find them.
Audit item | Audit resource |
Apps
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Users
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*Only available for verified domains |
Projects
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How to view all projects
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User groups
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How to view user groups |
Issue types
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How to view issue types
How to find unused Issue Types |
Workflows
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How to view all workflows
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Automation rules
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How to view automation rules |
Once you know what areas of your instance need cleaning, create rules so your team has a common understanding of what to keep and what’s redundant.
Review these questions to decide on your rules:
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💡 Pro Tip: Document your rules in a Confluence page for future reference. |
If you've never run any cleanup activities, the initial ones are likely to be a heavier lift. Start by identifying some quick wins for key problem areas and then reduce the noise over time.
Potential quick wins
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Administrators, team leads, and project admins can help you determine what needs cleaning and identify the entities that are redundant. Notify them about the planned cleanup and reach out to them to help. You’ll also want their input when developing a change management plan to make sure you’re effectively communicating changes to the rest of your organization.
💡 Pro Tip: We recommend backing up your instance and running any changes in a test environment first before applying them in production. |
Make sure you take notes as you go. This project is not only about cleaning the instance now, but maintaining order in the future. Try to think about what rules or changes to your process will help.
Audit item | How to archive/delete |
Apps | How to delete connected apps |
Users | How to delete inactive users |
User groups | How to delete user groups |
Projects |
How to archive a project* |
Custom fields |
How to delete custom fields* |
Issue types | How to delete an issue type |
Workflows | How to delete a workflow |
Automation rules | How to disable an automation rule |
This is when you update procedures and processes. At this point, you might know what you can automate so cleanup activities are less time-consuming in the future. Here are a few ideas:
Process improvements | Automations |
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Frequent cleanups tend to be less time-consuming than those performed at long intervals. Keep up the momentum and schedule time for regular cleanups.
Recommendations for cleanup scheduling
Quarterly |
Annually |
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Done a cleanup before? Already have a process for keeping your instance clean?
Let us know what advice you have for others doing this for the first time.👇
Kim Mooney
Digital Success Campaign Manager, Jira
Atlassian
Boston, MA
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