“What are some best practices for Jira migration?” Find out in this episode of Appfire Presents: The BEST Work Management Show by Appfire. Rachel Wright joins Appfire’s Emily Peet-Lukes to address some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Jira migration.
About the guest
Rachel Wright is an entrepreneur, process engineer, and Atlassian Certified Jira Administrator. She wrote “The Jira Strategy Admin Workbook” and “The Ultimate Guide to Jira Migrations: How to Migrate from Jira Server to Data Center or Cloud.” She’s also a speaker, an Atlassian Community Leader and author of courses for new and advanced Jira admins and users. She started using Jira and Confluence in 2011, became an administrator in 2013, and was certified in 2016 (the first year you could actually get certified). She’s the owner and founder of Industry Templates, LLC, which helps companies grow, get organized, and develop their processes.
About the show
The BEST Work Management Show by Appfire features smart leaders sharing their secrets for optimizing business processes and increasing productivity. Get the goods on how they handle everything from setting up workflows to automating processes. Every episode is 10 minutes or less, packed with insights you can use right away to supercharge your team’s productivity.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode
What are some best practices for Jira migration?
Emily: Today we’ll be talking about migration best practices with Atlassian expert and Jira rockstar Rachel Wright. You won’t want to miss these valuable tips, so stick around.
Thanks so much for joining us today to talk about migration best practices.
Rachel: I’m always happy to talk about anything Jira related.
Emily: We have put together this awesome FAQ to talk about some best practices for Jira migration. Do you want to give us a little insight into what you talked about?
Rachel: Sure. Obviously, you need to have a plan. That is the most important part of this whole migration. This is not something you want to just wing it on a weekend. This is something you need to actually plan for, understand what you’re doing, definitely test it.
I tell people plan out how long you think this is going to take, and then double it, honestly, because things come up that you just haven’t planned for. There are always unknowns. Maybe it’s not even something on your end. Maybe you need to wait for a vendor to release something. Maybe some of your teams are ready and not all of your teams are ready.
I think the biggest thing that you can do is to make sure that you sit down and have a plan, the same as you would do with your own software if you were releasing.
Emily: That makes sense. Being prepared, planning it out, it seems simple, but actually there are a lot of steps that go into it.
What else do we have going on?
Rachel: I also want to mention that you should choose what your path is going to be. Everybody’s path is going to be a little different. Of course, it depends on how big your application is, how many users you have, what your timeline looks like, if you have any compliance or security regulations to be aware of.
There are things you can do. You can go to Cloud from Server. You can go to Data Center. Data Center is quick, it could be as little as just pasting in a new license key, it could be that easy.
Emily: Wow. Are there benefits to either of those?
Rachel: Absolutely. They work totally differently, so it’s really something you should take a look at and make a smart decision for the future of your company. If your company is going to be hosting your own software for a long time, Data Center might make sense. If you have redundancy or data residency concerns, Data Center would make sense, too.
But the Cloud is inevitable, everybody is moving everything to the Cloud, so we all seem to end up there either way.
Emily: What other best practices do you want to share with people?
Rachel: Just to take it slow. You don’t know what you don’t know, and the only way to figure it out is to actually run the migration in a test environment.
Make sure you consider different configurations that you have that are important, see if they are supported in whatever platform you’re moving to before you move. You want to know what to look for after you’ve migrated. You don’t want to migrate and then say, “Oh, wait. We forgot about these important settings,” or, “We neglected to think about this area of the business.”
Emily: That makes a lot of sense. If you have some advice to give to people who are just about to start their preparations, some initial prep strategy that you could share?
Rachel: Sure. First, make sure that you have the right people on your migration team. It shouldn’t be just one person in charge of migration, some poor system admin somewhere. You need a team of strategic people to help you with this to make good decisions, to help you execute it, to help you test it. Somebody who can make leadership decisions and help communicate the changes that are coming down. Obviously, a tester, somebody who is going to look at the configuration and the data in depth to make sure everything looks good before you put it into production.
Emily: Teamwork makes the dream work. Right?
Rachel: Yes. You can’t do it all by yourself.
Emily: Exactly. One more question about the planning and prep. Once you do have that plan in place, what kind of advice would you give to people about ready to jump into that migration and implement that plan, is there something specific that you would tell people?
Rachel: It really depends a lot on your unique situation. If you go download the free Ultimate Guide to Jira Migrations on the Appfire website, I’ve laid out everything you should think about, everything you should know. There’s no sense in reinventing this wheel. At least start there, and it will give you things to think about, it will help you create your plan both for the preparation and for the actual launch itself.
Emily: Yes. And it has a lot of great worksheets so that you can really dig your hands into the planning and preparation and have some physical pieces of material to refer to and to keep going back to. It’s a really comprehensive guide, and I think it’s going to set people up real nice for their migrations.
This Atlassian Server end of life is on a lot of people’s minds at the moment. Any advice to give to people who are starting to consider what they’re going to do and their migration plan with that?
Rachel: Kind of like I said earlier, change is inevitable. I really believe that the only thing we can control is the way we react to that change. I’m working on this myself. It would make my life easier if I could be more easygoing and be ready for change.
This isn’t something you want to just hope will go away. You don’t want to wait. Start as early as possible, start now.
Emily: That makes sense. I think a lot of people want to push things off, they think they have a lot of time, but starting now gives you the ability to use all of the advice you’ve already given, like take it slow, be really detailed, bring on the right team. Time is of the essence, but also can be in people’s favor right now.
Any last minute words of advice for people who are looking into their migration strategy?
Rachel: This won’t be the first migration you’ve ever done. Everybody has survived migrations before in the past. You will get through this. Just take a deep breath, be thoughtful about the choices you make, and go for it.
Emily: Awesome. Thank you so much, Rachel. As always, you give the best advice. I think that your FAQ on migration best practices is a really awesome and handy piece of content for people to refer to when they are starting their migrations at any point in their organization. Thank you so much.
This has been Appfire Presents The Best Work Management Show by Appfire. You can find more info on migration best practices in our FAQ linked below. You can watch more episodes of The Best Work Management Show at Hub.Appfire.com. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.
Last updated: 2023-07-31
Emily Peet-Lukes
See all content by Emily Peet-Lukes
