Simplifying Jira for future scalability at Cloudhouse

​Background

Cloudhouse is a growing London-based company enabling Citrix and Microsoft customers to migrate incompatible/unsupported applications to the latest Windows environments using their own Cloudhouse Containers.

Cloudhouse uses Jira Cloud to support the delivery of its services and to manage internal processes, while Confluence Cloud is used for internal documentation.

Having decided to take a step back, Cloudhouse asked New Verve to review the configuration for both Jira and Confluence, help solve current issues, and apply best practices moving forward.

Challenge

With a large volume of legacy configuration in place across both applications, administrative tasks were too complex and time-consuming. As the user base scaled, Cloudhouse needed to reduce and minimize this maintenance overhead.

Cloudhouse also wished to gain valuable insights into their teams’ work by introducing advanced reporting capabilities.

The Solution

To kick off our engagement, we performed an application health check. This led to a comprehensive report outlining a set of recommended configuration changes based on industry standards and best practices.

We then ran an on-site workshop to discuss these changes in more detail and to map business requirements and internal processes to the tools.

Implementation work was planned and executed in close cooperation with the team at Cloudhouse:

• we made the Jira and Confluence configuration much leaner by merging and removing schemes, thus minimizing admin overhead and improving overall performance;
• we revised and simplified global and project permissions to match the required level of granularity, thus making it much easier to use and maintain;
• we established new workflow and Kanban boards that better reflected internal processes;
• we introduced several reports to improve visibility and control over ongoing work.

Reporting requirements were delivered in a number of ways using JQL filters, Tempo Timesheet worklog reports, and shared Jira dashboards at project, team, and management levels.

To report across multiple sources and dimensions, we recommended the eazyBI Marketplace add-on for evaluation. A number of custom reports, charts, and dashboard gadgets were trialled using eazyBI.

Categories: Reporting Agile

Technologies: Jira Software, Tempo, eazyBI, Confluence

"We approached New Verve after a number of years administering Jira and Confluence internally. There was complete transparency throughout the engagement and they were able to provide useful solutions for several outstanding issues. They provided us with a neat and professional solution that was easy to track and implement."

- Sherman Peiris, Professional Services Manager