ISYS302/ITEC602: Analyzing Issues with Atlassian's Flagship Jira PM

This report discusses the issues confronting Atlassian with its flagship project management product, Jira, in the context of cloud migration and evolving user expectations. It highlights challenges such as difficulties in data transfer, cloud security concerns, frequent Jira releases, and the dilemma of wh...Read More

ISSUES CONFRONTING ATLASSIAN IN ITS FLAGSHIP PM PRODUCT 1
ISSUES CONFRONTING ATLASSIAN IN ITS FLAGSHIP PM PRODUCT
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Introduction
Project management software assists managers of various projects in executing their daily
managerial roles. Some of these roles include the fulfillment of client requirements on time and
within the budget constraint planned by organizations (Abdel-Hamid and Madnick 2013, p.1).
There is various project management software which can be used by organization’s project
managers some of which include Jira, ProWorkflow, Office Timeline, EasyProjects and Procore
among others.
Atlassian Australian software giant uses Jira in enabling its software developers to manage their
workflows. Jira has been successful in enabling Atlassia to execute its duties of software
development and hence has enabled the organization to improve its revenue. However, due to the
increasing customer base for Atlassia which is now moving to the cloud, it has become necessary
for Atlassia to give its flagship product project management tool Jira a complete makeover in
order to accommodate the customer increased needs. Atlassia has faced various issues in the
flagship of its project management tool Jira. The various issues encountered have been discussed
below.
i. Difficulties associated with the transfer of data
In the course of migrating to the cloud, an organization has to transfer all its data from the usual
way to the cloud. In the event of transferring data to the cloud, some crucial data may leak out or
even be lost (Zhang, Chiu and Liu 2014, p.148). Atlassia has been faced with the challenge of
transferring their huge customer base to the cloud as most of their customers have migrated to
the cloud and are now making purchases of cloud versions of Atlassian software. The process of

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Atlassian moving to the cloud to suit its customer needs is a difficult one and has to be carefully
planned and executed to prevent data loss which a crucial tool for the project managers.
ii. Issues related to cloud security
Cloud security utilizes various set policies, controls, technologies and controls in protecting data,
services, virtualized IP and applications among others. Cloud security must be observed for an
organization to function well (Kandukuri and Rakshit 2015, p.517). Careful maintenance of
migrated data to the cloud needs to be done to prevent leakage of business information. Atlassia
has been faced with the issue of maintaining its data secure as it will now be sharing its project
views with many software development teams through the cloud. This has been possible as the
Atlassian flagship project management tool product makeover has enabled it to change from the
initial user experience and project workflow hence introducing various new features which
include road maps among others. These introduced new features enable business organizations to
share information broadly amongst them through the cloud and hence security is a must to
protect the businesses’ crucial private data and information to prevent leakage in the event of
sharing.
iii. Challenges associated with frequent Jira releases
Jira project management tool used to be released only once per year in the past. With this,
administrators were able to manipulate its operations and make sure that correct results were
obtained as there were no frequent alterations of the software. With the current migration into the
cloud, Jira applications are now being released frequently almost on a weekly basis (Fisher,
Koning and Ludwigsen 2013, p.644176). This is a challenge for Atlassia as its team has to be
autonomous to manage the frequent releases. This means that the organization might consider

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adding more employees to help the management to cope up with the frequent releases. It may
also require the organization to further to train their management in order to equip them with
more skills of dealing with frequent Jira releases which means more frequent alterations on the
functioning of Jira are likely to occur. All these challenges associated with frequent Jira releases
may increase the overall organization’s costs.
iv. A dilemma on whether to change Jira or not
Atlassia has been faced with the problem of determining whether or not to change Jira as a tool
for project management which highly helps its customers. Old customers to the organization feel
that the software is okay and should remain unchanged while the new prospective customers to
the organization more the software developer graduating from universities expect some changes
to be made to the application. It is, therefore, a problem for Atlassia to make the right decision as
it may lose its old customers if it changes the software and it may lose new customers if it does
not change the software.
Conclusion
Many businesses are currently migrating to the cloud operations to access various methods of
business management so as to improve their profitability. Atlassia which is an Australian
software giant has migrated to the cloud to accommodate the many needs of its customers whose
greater percentage has also migrated to the cloud. Many issues have confronted Atlassia in
implementing its migration decision. Some of these issues include cloud security, difficulties
associated with data transfer and frequent Jira releases among others. It, therefore, requires
Atlassia to carefully plan and execute its migration into the cloud in order to succeed.

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References
Abdel-Hamid, T.K. and Madnick, S.E., 2013. Software project dynamics: an integrated
approach (Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Fisher, J., Koning, D. and Ludwigsen, A.P., 2013. Utilizing atlassian jira for large-scale
software development management (No. LLNL-CONF-644176). Lawrence Livermore National
Lab.(LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States).
Kandukuri, B.R. and Rakshit, A., 2015, September. Cloud security issues. In 2009 IEEE
International Conference on Services Computing (pp. 517-520). IEEE.
Zhang, G., Chiu, L. and Liu, L., 2014, July. Adaptive data migration in multi-tiered storage
based cloud environment. In 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing(pp.
148-155). IEEE.