Overview
Enterprises have increasingly adopted team collaboration systems and project management with bug/issue tracking software to plan, track and manage agile software development projects. However, as these solutions have proliferated, companies often find that multiple instances of the same software has been implemented in different business units, resulting in unintended silos that were not designed with potential future consolidation in mind. Compounding that issue, different departments implement business processes and terminology that are unique to them, and that create additional challenges when attempting to merge capabilities. Finally, as these systems are adopted more heavily and the sheer volume of data contained within them increases, stability can become a major concern and require dedicated maintenance resources.
Our client, one of the largest cable TV companies and largest home Internet service providers in the United States, wanted to migrate the infrastructure and management of their enterprise collaboration and project management solution. The client also wanted expert assessment on their usage of the system and performance tuning to ensure they were adhering to best practices across lines of business. Working with our team at Praecipio Consulting, the telecommunications conglomerate has achieved its goals of obtaining stability of their solution, minimizing downtime and improving the end user experience to drive future adoption and expanded use.
THE CHALLENGE
With multiple instances of Jira (and different software versions of Jira), and millions of issues being tracked in each, our client’s system had outgrown their desire to effectively manage the solution internally.
These systems had also grown increasingly complex over time and system stability had begun to deteriorate to the point where crashes were occurring daily, sometimes multiple times each day. The instability was creating a poor user experience that was negatively impacting adoption.
Migrating the solution from the client’s environment to Praecipio's Cumulus private cloud and converting them from Jira and Confluence Server to Jira and Confluence Data Center would allow them to offload the weight of supporting the system. But the performance issues remained initially and created the dual challenge for Praecipio Consulting of maintaining the system while investigating and resolving problems piece by piece.
Our team would have to identify and resolve problems related to business process and system usage (e.g. duplicate fields and workflows, many and cluttered schema, poor data quality from fielditis, etc.) as well as infrastructure issues (e.g. garbage collection and heap management, timeouts, slow page loads, etc.) in order to deliver the desired outcome.
THE SOLUTION
Beyond expertise and domain knowledge, communication and collaboration is essential for a migration project of this scale and complexity. Praecipio's solution began with the creation of a dedicated HipChat channel to create real-time chat and collaboration. The teams also established a daily stand-up routine to identify and eliminate blockers and keep both groups constantly informed and up to date.
The migration project began with a duplication of the client’s infrastructure in Cumulus, Praecipio's Atlassian-optimized hosting solution for Enterprise SaaS. This environment not only met the client’s requirements for a scalable, fail-safe, and highly-available cloud hosting for their applications, it also enabled a migration from Jira Server to Jira Data Center implementation.
Praecipio then focused heavily on performance tuning, which included eliminating system crashes and poor performance. As tuning was achieved over the ensuing weeks, system reliability and user experience began to improve.
The solution also included intensive analysis of system logs to identify performance bottlenecks, which required assessment of not only Jira software, but the numerous add-in applications. The team implemented multiple monitoring solutions to more quickly identify and resolve issues due to infrastructure, user, or other issues.
Beyond technical issues, the Praecipio solution also included identifying and implementing improvements for user behaviors that were impacting overall system performance. Because of this insight, the teams are now collaborating in a more proactive way to identify and resolve problems even faster, and notifications can alert on issues even in advance of failures and crashes.
THE RESULTS
Our client now enjoys a leaner, more stable Jira platform that has been converted to the Data Center model, and that can accommodate the rigors of an enterprise-level use of the solution. Not only does the system perform better overall, but visibility into system usage has been improved and has enabled our client to identify poor behavior and enforce best practices. With this more reliable solution, our client has been able to onboard many more users and drive their internal adoption goals.
