Reinvent our team

[Michiel Schuijer]

Hi, I'm working at TomTom, the navigation company many people think is no longer relevant because there is free Google maps.

TomTom actually is more active than ever, and is one of only four truly global companies making maps of the world designed for commercial applications.

We have gone through many changes of course, still are changing regularly, and the same goes for my team.

My teammates and I used to be part of a larger team, responsible for a large set of developer related enterprise tools: Source Code Management (Bitbucket), Code Quality (Fisheye/Crucible, SonarQube), CI-CD (Jenkins, AzureDevOps), Secret Management (HashiCorp Vault) and several more categories and tools.

Jira and Confluence were the spine that bound these things together, taking care of documenting instructions and many more topics, team collaboration, and tracking software development (dev teams, mostly scrum) as well as task management (for units like IT, Marketing, Facilities and any other business unit that wanted to track properly instead of via email, some scrum and kanban mixes.)

My team is now a small focus group of four people, focussed solely on managing Confluence and Jira, which are still heavily used, but under pressure from modern solutions and services that are or seem to be newer, shinier and smoother (yes, we still use Server and Data Center).

How to stay afloat, prove that Jira and Confluence are still relevant while, for example, GitHub offers "Issues" (vs. Jira) and "Pages" (vs. Confluence), Jira and Confluence Cloud offer newer and other features and how do we prepare and eventually migrate to Cloud, are the challenges ahead of us.

[Christine P. Dela Rosa]

@Michiel Schuijer - I think other Community members will have more direct experience and lessons learned to share.

But in the meantime, check out some of the info found here: https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/why-cloud. It might be a good first step if you haven't seen this already.

[Michiel Schuijer]

Thanks. I have seen that already.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Michiel Schuijer ,

For sure Confluence and Jira are great tools that work very well together. I guess my first question would be what are these newer/shinier tools and how do they stack up to your requirements? In my opinion the cloud versions of Confluence and Jira are at the top of the game. It really comes down to your requirements and which tools meet your needs the best. Maybe some of the pressure is coming from the fact that the IT team doesn't want to maintain multiple products? As someone that was responsible for overseeing a number of IT groups in my career I can certainly understand that. 

Regarding the migration it could be rather straightforward or quite complex depending on your situation. Maybe you simply need to migrate over the information pertinent to your group if the other stuff is going to be abandoned anyway? If it gets complex it may be that you want a partner to help you out with this. However I'm guessing that added cost it's gonna be another lever for those adding pressure to change.

If I were in your position here's the way would approach the problem:

1. Fully understand the requirements of your team and others
2. Understand who is winning a different set of tools and truly why they wish to change
3. Perform an assessment of the two options against your requirements listing out the pros and cons

This is very much like doing an internal RFP.

[Charly _DEISER_]

Thanks for sharing!