Practical Recommendations for Cleaning and Organizing Your Atlassian Instance

Practical Recommendations for Cleaning Up Jira Service Management

In considering Atlassian cleanup, it’s not uncommon to think first of Jira, and then of Confluence. These are both business-critical applications, and it makes good sense to direct much of your time and effort toward them. However, at Isos Technology, we often recommend taking a business service approach to cleanup, and this means looking first at Jira Service Management (JSM). In today’s business and IT environment, all organizations are service organizations, and JSM often sits at the center of an organization’s Atlassian applications. If an unwieldy Atlassian instance is causing problems, they will often be reflected as tickets in JSM.

In the following paragraphs, we provide a high-level roadmap for cleaning up your JSM instance and streamlining service delivery.

• Clean Up Request Forms
  The first step in cleaning up your JSM instance is to look at how the ITSM team is providing services to other IT teams, as well as business teams. At a high level, you’ll want to look at not just what types of requests are coming in, but how people are making the requests—the language they are using—so that you can make sure the language you use for request types makes sense to the requestors. You will also need to identify what information is needed to fulfill those requests. Then, you can use form builders to develop detailed intake request forms that ensure all relevant information is being captured upfront. 
•  Analyze Tickets and Issues and Establish Metrics
  Next, you’ll need to analyze what types of tickets or issues are coming in to determine what services they relate to, and what teams will need to be involved in addressing them. You will also want to look at which issue types are just things that happen now and then, things that are consistent and ongoing (like provisioning and de-provisioning new employees), or if they are indicative of systemic problems that need long-term and perhaps labor-intensive solutions.

Following are some things to consider when analyzing tickets and issue types:

• What types of tickets are coming in? Grouping tickets by issue will help you identify where your customers are encountering roadblocks. That way, you can direct effort to get systems in place that minimize these issues, and/or streamline the way these issues are resolved so that you free up bandwidth.
• How long do certain ticket or issue types take to resolve? Comparing this against volume will help you understand bandwidth and support better resource planning.
• What teams or departments are neediest and/or the least needy? Perhaps those squeaky wheels have underlying issues that need to be addressed with larger, more long-term projects. Conversely, just because certain groups aren’t making requests, doesn’t mean they don’t need help. They may be suffering in silence. Either way, you’ll want to prioritize work by greatest need and business impact while balancing focus across departments.

Once you've analyzed the tickets and issues that are coming in, you can create reports for measuring key metrics on an ongoing basis which will help you identify issues sooner and make future cleanups easier. You can also create playbooks outside of JSM, like in Confluence, that document common types of issues and the processes for resolving them. This will help identify places where you can align teams to similar ways of doing things, and make it easier to spin up new workflows for similar types of issues. 

• Clean Up Your Workflows
  Once you’ve analyzed the data, you can see what types of tickets will follow a given workflow and make sure the workflows capture all of the relevant steps. Each team should have autonomy over what their workflows look like— JSM is flexible enough to meet the unique needs of each team. Still, you should aim for these to be as simple as possible, and for there to be as few workflows as necessary, while ensuring that nothing has to take place outside the system. Another thing to keep in mind is how and when the requester needs to be updated about progress on their ticket. They don’t need to see everything behind the scenes, but they do need to be reassured that progress is being made.
  
  Once the ITSM team’s processes for request intake are dialed in, you can extend this effort to other business teams like facilities, human resources, legal, and marketing, to help them clean up and streamline their own intake processes. A best practice is to create a single location where customers across the company can go to submit requests of all types, regardless of which team might be fulfilling them, so they don’t have to remember how to get to different portals.

• Clean Up Your Knowledge Base
  If you are using Confluence to power a knowledge base or wiki so that customers who come to your JSM portal can self-serve, rather than submit a ticket, yet you are still seeing tickets come in for issues that could be resolved on a self-serve basis, you may need to prioritize cleaning up your knowledge base. If your Confluence knowledge base has too many pages, duplicate pages, or pages that are not structured well, it may be returning results that are not helpful to your customers, which will only serve to add to their frustrations. Consider it an opportunity to better structure your existing self-help content, and to come up with a list of useful content that needs to be created based on common issue types.

For more information on cleaning up Confluence, see Section 4.

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Practical Recommendations for Cleaning Up Confluence

Over time, Confluence is another area where information and data tend to accumulate, making it hard for users to find the most current and/or relevant content and slowing the system down. Confluence cleanup activities fall broadly into two categories: cleaning up your site and spaces, and reducing unnecessary data.

In the following paragraphs, we’ll explore ways to address both concerns.

• Clean Up Sites and Spaces
  Maintaining a clean, clutter-free Confluence site goes a long way toward enhancing usability — it makes it much easier to find relevant information. Following are three key tactics for reducing clutter related to spaces, pages, and accounts.
  • Delete or Archive Unused Spaces
    If you have old spaces that are no longer in use—personal spaces of people who have left the company, for example—a good way to reduce clutter and minimize impact on system performance is to simply delete them. Depending on your organization’s policies and audit needs, you can also archive them or export them and back them up in long-term storage.
  • Clean Up Unneeded Spaces
    Content often has a shelf life, and after a period of time, you may find that it’s no longer relevant. In addition, people often create duplicate content or start content, then never fully develop it. All of these situations can lead to a cluttered space. There are a couple of options for cleaning up obsolete pages: they can be moved to a specific area of the page tree where they won’t be in the way, or they can be moved to a new space that can then be archived.
  • Disable Accounts Owned by Inactive Users
    Many organizations include disabling accounts owned by inactive users as part of their standard de-provisioning practices, but it is something that occasionally gets overlooked. Similarly, sometimes people change roles and no longer need Confluence access, even though they’re still with the company. It’s worth periodically double-checking to make sure inactive accounts have been disabled.
• Reduce Unnecessary Data
  Confluence sites can become data heavy, especially if, like many organizations, you are storing iterative versions of multiple files in them. Cleaning up old data may require a bit of manual effort, but it can improve system performance and make backups and upgrades faster. One of the quickest, easiest ways to free up space in Confluence is to simply empty the trash on a regular basis. Beyond that, there are several other tactics at your disposal.
  • Remove Unneeded Large Attachments
    Some users may be storing old, iterative versions of large photo, video, or audio files that are no longer needed because newer versions exist. You can go into Space Attachments and sort by size to see if this is the case. If you find spaces with unusually large attachments, it might be worth it to reach out to the space owner to see if all these are necessary or if some can be deleted.
  • Delete or Export Old Spaces
    Deleting old spaces is not just a way to minimize clutter as we previously described—it can have a big impact on system performance if those spaces house a significant amount of data. If deleting spaces is not an option due to organizational policies or audit concerns, then exporting them and storing them elsewhere will have a similar impact.

Recommended Reading

Looking to learn more about cleaning up Confluence? Here are four great resources.

          Atlassian Support: Clean Up Your Confluence Instance
          Atlassian Support: Delete Confluence Space
          Atlassian Support: Archive a Confluence Space
          Atlassian Support: Export a Confluence Space

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Best Practices for Maintaining a Clean Atlassian Instance

Since an unwieldy or messy Atlassian instance can have significant impact on system performance and team productivity, maintaining it is a strategic imperative, not a nice-to-have. To ensure that critical maintenance is prioritized, it’s important to have an agreed-upon plan of action in place for how and when to do cleanup-related tasks. Another primary way of maintaining a clean instance is to establish governance around it. This entails setting ground rules for how to use your Atlassian tools, explaining why adhering to the overarching organizational structure is important, and outlining when it is necessary and acceptable to deviate from standards.

In the following paragraphs, we explore five best practices that will help your organization prioritize and maintain a clean Atlassian instance.

• Create a Maintenance Plan of Action
  Two key ways of prioritizing cleanup-related activities are to establish metrics that reinforce their business value relative to their impact on work, and to develop a schedule and checklist for what needs to be done and when.
  
  • Establish Metrics
    Metrics are a data-driven way to help determine when and what to tackle in terms of maintenance. They might include things like the number of projects that haven’t been used in a given time period. Look at ratios such as the number of projects to people, workflows to projects, and/or fields to screens. Unwieldy numbers serve as an indicator that it is time to clean up.
  • Develop a Schedule
    Regularly schedule maintenance in a way that works for the size of your organization and instance, whether that’s quarterly, semiannually, or annually. Make a checklist of what needs to be evaluated and when, and be sure to allocate the appropriate resources and time needed for maintenance.
• Establish Governance or Guidelines for Using the Tools
  The term governance can be off-putting: it is suggestive of top-down, restrictive rules and regulations, which seemingly contrast with both the flexibility of Atlassian tools and agile practices. Yet, at its core, governance is simply about setting ground rules for how to use your Atlassian tools. There should be an overarching organizational structure and consistent nomenclature that guides decision-making, but thoughtful consideration should also be given to why and when to deviate from the standards that are set.
  
  • Create a Governance Board or Community of Practice
    Atlassian tools are all about breaking down silos and enabling cross-functional collaboration, and your governance board should reflect this. At Isos Technology, we encourage the notion of a community of practice—a group that represents domain expertise and teams across the company who work together to develop organizational guidelines for tool usage. They should meet frequently to collectively evaluate requests and develop solutions for enabling teams to work in ways that serve them best within the overarching structure.
  • Maintain a Balance between Structure and Flexibility
    Atlassian tools are designed to be flexible and support autonomy among teams in determining how they work, but they’re also intended to support cross-functional collaboration, transparency, and reporting. Because of this, governance is all about maintaining a delicate balance between structure and flexibility.
• Limit Administrator Access (While Respecting User Needs)
  One of the most straightforward ways to keep your Atlassian instance from getting unwieldy is to limit who has administrator access and can make configuration changes. That said, there is a balance to be achieved—Atlassian tools are designed to be flexible and they need to meet the needs of the teams using them. The best admins are skilled enough to understand organizational strategy around governance while being responsive to team and user needs. They can evaluate requests, think critically about if and how those requests can be standardized, and come up with innovative solutions to meet user needs. In addition, they are forward-looking—they anticipate the upcoming needs of their evolving user base and keep an eye on tool development and enhancement to make sure they are prepared.
• Turn Your Users into Advocates with Training
  The people who work in your Atlassian tools every day have a vested interest in their success. After all, it’s their work that is impacted if the tools are not working optimally. Once governance and ground rules have been established for how the tools should work, it can be helpful to engage the broader user base in regular training, helping them to understand the why behind the choices, and how they benefit the larger organization. It’s also important to collect feedback. This not only encourages users to become more invested in the tools, it helps them become better stewards of its upkeep and ultimately minimizes downstream cleanup.
• Engage Experts
  At Isos Technology, we have seen many organizations successfully clean up their Atlassian instances on their own; however, some companies benefit from bringing in an expert. This is particularly true if there are multiple instances, the instance is particularly large, or even if the organization is simply struggling to find the time. An Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner like Isos can help companies build a long-term strategy for how best to use their instances based on business goals, structure their tools so that they can scale effectively without becoming unmanageable, and target the actions that will deliver the greatest return on investment. In addition, Isos brings best practices and know-how around the fastest, most efficient way to get the job done.

How Isos Technology Can Help

Cleaning up your Atlassian instance is no small undertaking, especially the first time, although the scope and complexity of the task vary widely depending on how large your instance is, how long it has been in use, and what type of resources you have been able to dedicate to its ongoing maintenance. Many organizations attempt to go it alone, to varying degrees of success. If your organization is able to dedicate the human resources and time needed for clean up, then this whitepaper and Atlassian’s cleanup guides are a great place to start. However, if the task seems daunting, if a migration is imminent, or if you simply have not been able to prioritize clean up and maintenance, engaging with a solution partner may be worth it.

Isos Technology is an Atlassian Platinum and Enterprise Solution Partner, and the 2020 Atlassian Partner of the Year: ITSM, and 2019 Atlassian Partner of the Year: Enterprise. Our passion for Atlassian comes from our own experience—one of the first decisions we made as a new company in 2005 was to invest in Atlassian tools to support our own work. From there, the decision to offer support for the tools to our customers was an easy one. Today, our work is 100% focused on helping companies of all sizes, from small-to-medium businesses to large-scale enterprises, get the most return on their technology investment.

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