Neptune Technology Group Inc. is a technology company serving more than 4,000 water utilities across North America. With multiple development, design and engineering teams collaborating on numerous company initiatives, Neptune recognized the pressing need for a consolidated environment of their Atlassian application instances. This is their migration success story.

Challenges

Like many organizations, Neptune had a bottom-up adoption approach to Atlassian’s applications. Within a relatively short span of time, the company was actively using and maintaining three disjointed Jira and two Bitbucket instances – one cloud and one server.

Neptune were faced with three significant challenges that led to the subsequent consolidation effort:

High costs of ownership & licensing fees: managing multiple instances entails a higher cost of ownership – the administration costs and licensing fees were adding unnecessary costs to the company.
User access challenges: persistent collaboration problems where a user will have access to one Jira instance, but not the other. Additionally, the client was continually hitting their user tier and every time access needed to be granted to a user, and someone had to be removed.
Inconsistent project configurations & lack of visibility: the inconsistent project configurations and differences in versions proved challenging to manage and administer. Having to upgrade versions and implement configuration changes across all instances separately was a costly and time-intensive undertaking, required on a semi-regular basis. Additionally, people didn’t have consistent visibility across the multiple initiatives and often had to switch access between instances.

Faced with these challenges, our client decided that the best approach would be to consolidate their Atlassian application instances by merging their three existing Jira instances into one and moving to a consolidated Bitbucket server.

Solution

The merging of Atlassian application instances requires the migration of all projects, issues, historical data, schemes, workflows, etc. from one instance to another without losing or changing the existing data in the target instance. After the merger, users are expected to resume their work in the target instance. Appfire’s team has a long-standing record of successful and transparent for the end user mergers and migrations.

Appfire’s team executed the consolidation initiative for Neptune in four stages in the timespan of a little less than 6 weeks.

The phases include:

Analysis phase: during this stage, an analysis of the conflicts and gaps between the project configurations was performed and all parties agreed on Application Migration Specification (AMS) document that defined the scope of the initiative
Development phase: during this stage, the migration procedure was developed and tested on the test server
Staging phase: the migration deployment procedure was staged and tested on the staging server
Production: the migration deployment procedure was executed in the official production environment.

During this process, all the projects from the three Jira instances and two Bitbucket servers were successfully consolidated into a new instance – the initiative was completed on time, within budget and without any significant issues.

Results and Benefits

Upon completion of the consolidation effort, Neptune was able to enjoy some immediate benefits, as well as projecting several longer-term benefits for the company.

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Immediate benefits

Active directory login: the consolidation completely resolved Neptune’s user access challenges. Instead of having local accounts, users can now log in with their user IDs to Neptune’s consolidated Jira instance where the current licensing model accommodates all existing users.

Better visibility and collaboration between teams: after the successful consolidation, all team members were able to experience the immediate improvements of the new system, gained better visibility and improved the communications between the various teams.

Long-term benefits

ROI in administrative costs and licensing: the consolidated Jira and Bitbucket instances are projected to significantly reduce the costs associated with administration and licensing, thus seeing a return on investment within the next 12 months of operation.

Standardization of project configuration: the consolidation enabled Neptune’s team to set standard processes deliverables across development, engineering, design, manufacturing and other teams using Jira, thus further reducing time, resources and bottlenecks associated with managing different project configurations across multiple instances.

Consistency in Jira usage: one of the objectives of this consolidation initiative was to achieve a consistent usage of Jira software company-wide – with active directory login, consistent project configurations, and better visibility into projects.

To learn more about the Configuration Manager for Jira, read this guide.

How merging Jira & Bitbucket instances facilitated better visibility & collaboration between teams

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