Move to Jira Server to dodge New Navigation?

[#1]

As some of the user base begins to experience this "New" navigation, which they absolutely hate, the topic of moving from Jira Cloud to ServiceNow or Jira Server is being brought to my table. Are any other admins dealing with similar situations? Curious how you are attempting to handle things. If you have completed a Migration to Jira Server from Cloud how was the transition? Run into many pitfalls? 

[Todd Skelton]

Honestly, I'm not 100% sold on the new nav, but I've enabled it for myself and am getting used to it.    We wont' be moving to a different system or to server, but have instead taken to documenting all the nuances/differences for our users.    We are set to go live on new nav next week, so I'm sure we'll have questions from the user base next week as everyone dives in.   It's change...seemingly unnecessary change/disruption, but change nonetheless...and there will always be resistance to it...We've decided to just press on through the change and get the users as much info and as much warning. as we can provide.

[Mathew Lederman]

Honestly, give it a month. The complaints will die down almost entirely. I don't particularly like the new nav either, and I've been using it for 3+ weeks. I've met with the product team who deployed the change and the research team looking to continually improve the new nav. A variety of of complaints that the teams accepted were shortfalls, but it's not like the tool is unusable. Things just moved around. 

The move from Datacenter > Cloud was rough because the plug-ins interact with Jira differently. In datacenter, plug-ins have direct database access, where in Cloud they have to access through the API. Datacenter plug-ins usually have more and better functionality (in my experience) so that would probably be a good thing for the move.

The biggest down-side I can see is the rollback with project automation. If you use automation heavily, moving to Datacenter is not going to be an easy path because automation in Cloud is far more advanced than DC. If not, then I don't see it being much more difficult than a Datacenter > Cloud move.

As for moving to another tool like ServiceNow, I can't speak to that transition. I'm sure it's possible, but moving between tools will always come with headaches. 

[Staffan Redelius]

I don't think a migration to Jira Server is the way to go since it EOL. I think DC is going in the same direction.

I am a heavy user of Jira as an admin and I still need to look for things that have been engraved in my muscle memory. Even after a month or so.

But still, I don't think the new navigation is that bad. There is a different logic that will take time to get used to but you will adapt after a couple of weeks.

I worked with a customer on DC about a year ago and boy that UI feels old compared to cloud.

Leaving the Atlassian ecosystem for another application because you don't like the navigation seems a bit rash.

[Todd Skelton]

Also, moving to a completely different platform that will have different navigation to avoid the existing product's new navigation would seem counterproductive.

[Mathew Lederman]

Leaving the Atlassian ecosystem for another application because you don't like the navigation seems a bit rash.

It does, until you consider the number of 10+ year old bugs and feature requests in Atlassian's backlog that were put aside for changes like this that nobody asked for or wanted.

For the curious among us, there are 157 feature cloud-specific requests that are more than 10 years old with more than 250 votes.

[Shawn Masters]

@Todd Skelton  as @Mathew Lederman  pointed out this new UI was prioritized over countless other bugs in the system and this change in UI seems to be happening every few years. The Development and Project Management teams have gone to our C-Suite with so many complaints that they are considering moving to a more stable platform where we can choose whether or not to move to a New UI and not be forced into it. Our teams are elbow deep in work for the company....having to halt all work to retrain consultants and internal users so they can find the work they are supposed to be focused on really digs into their timelines / deadlines. 

[Josh]

@Todd Skelton makes a great point here.

Adding onto that - if the concern is that Atlassian is not implementing necessary features or listening to customers in Cloud, changing to Server / DC would likely also not yield the desired results.

One common misunderstanding that I used to have and continue to see in the broader Community is that feature requests are not universally prioritized. If Atlassian chose not to implement the new navigation, it's not like those resources would jump into working on backup and restore infrastructure, custom field contexts, or JQL improvements. Those team members would simply work on other navigation features or disband and join other teams. There are priorities for the product / features a given team is responsible for and a lot of them are tied to unlocking new customers, markets, use cases, etc. Capitalism is at work here. Atlassian has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and if they only focused on features that make existing customers happy without continuing to grow revenues they'd get punished for it. Now that said, they need to maintain some level of customer satisfaction to keep their current customer base.

Knowing more about how Atlassian makes feature decisions doesn't make the new UI any better, but it does help us know how to influence their thinking and priorities. When you see product teams posting articles or engaging in the community, provide specific and actionable feedback. If you have a CSM, do the same with them. If you attend Atlassian events, seek out the product teams at those events and explain the challenges you're facing, what you need them to focus on, and how them focusing on those challenges will ultimately help Atlassian make more money.

[Todd Skelton]

As the owner of the system, Atlassian gets to set its priorities...as do all other vendors.   To believe that somehow, another vendor is not going to have a similar backlog is a bit daft, honestly.  Software vendors have huge backlogs of bugs and enhancement requests and as a product manager, you have the task of balancing that with work the organization wants to accomplish for their own reasons. 

The question was about moving to a different system to avoid the new navigation.,..not about bugs and enhancement requests that are not prioritized as you believe they should be.  If that's the issue...leave., but to say it's just to avoid new nav is a bit of a fool's errand, because no matter what you go to, the nav will be new to your users. 

[Shawn Masters]

They would rather defer all changes until it works best for them. It's the same complaints we get when a new windows version is deployed to end users.  What do you do to prep your user base for these types of changes? 

[Mathew Lederman]

@Shawn Masters you're absolutely right. I would rather defer significant changes until my organization can budget for them.  This change will cost my organization >$1M in lost productivity ($47/hr average salary according to Glassdoor × 5000 active Jira users × 5 hours of lost productivity while users poke and hunt to find the tools they need in the new navigation), 

We've provided multiple training sessions, announcements, documentation, Slack notifications, Jira banners, etc. I expect 1/4 to 1/5 of the user-base to actually read or attend any of the information we've provided. And even those who attend every session and read every document will still struggle because muscle memory is a real thing.

[James Rickards _SN_]

Give it a month to get used to, and provide feedback about what is not working for you.

Over 20 years, I've used SaaS work management systems such as SharePoint with Power Automate, ServiceNow, IBM Rational suite, Remedy, Monday.com SalesForce etc, and I still prefer the Atlassian toolset, and a number of proprietary core business systems. They all have UI changes that upset users muscle memory when they update.

In this case, the communication from Atlassian was by far the best and they have listened to feedback and respond to it with transparency.

The UI is not perfect, and can be improved, but it has so far been intuitive with the exception of a few sections I've provided feedback about (which has been acknowledged).

Overall, our users are happy with the change after using it for the last month. Especially the newer ones, who overall find the interface more user friendly than the old UI.

[__ Jimi Wikman]

@Shawn Masters you are pointing towards an important topic, which is the cost on the customer side to keep up with all the changes and the time required to manage large changes like the UI change.

No matter how we feel about the changes, there is always a cost on the end user's side when new things are deployed to the tool they work in. Considering the massive amount of changes happening every day and the poor documentation and communication regarding these changes, it IS a big problem for many, I feel.

Moving away from a SaaS solution to a release based self-hosted version can of course create stability, but it comes at the cost of customization. Many DC solutions today have many customizations that exist because the functionality has not been built yet in DC. In a stale environment where you do not upgrade often, this will increase and as a result upgrades might become near impossible, or at least very, very expensive and time-consuming.

I have seen organizations spending tens of millions, if not more, trying to revert years of changes, and it has always failed in my experience. Monolith installations have their place, but you need to take the high cost up upgrading into consideration when you commit to such architecture.

Moving to DC or to ServiceNow should not be done through migration, in my opinion. I feel the same about DC to cloud as well if you have an old Onion platform. Start fresh and build from scratch, then move work items if you must, or leave them in read only state if you can.

My advice for you in your situation is to break down the options and the pros and cons long term and short term and then assign costs for a five-year prognosis. I think you will find that moving to another platform will be a very, very expensive affair, and the list of cons will far outweigh the pros for such an endeavor.

Listen to your users, talk to your stakeholders and set a strategy together. It is all you can do when you are at the mercy of another company, which will be there in a SaaS solution as well as in a self-hosted product solution.

[Rick Westbrock]

I had a hard time adjusting to the New Nav but I'd advise against a knee-jerk reaction. Change is hard for all of us but Atlassian is going to tune New Nav over time in response to customer feedback. It would be nice if they did more research before implementing such drastic changes but that ship has sailed. There would also be a similar problem with users having to learn Jira DC as it differs from Cloud in some not insignificant ways.

Before the naysayers pipe in I have to mention that I was fortunate enough to spend a full hour with an Atlassian doing an interview where they gathered my feedback on New Nav and for a few of my concerns they are apparently already working on enhancements. I know it sucks to have to deal with a sub-optimal UI for a while but even if you migrate to Jira DC there are going to be releases where similar changes are made so the only way to truly dodge those (no matter who the vendor is) would be to never upgrade.

[Calvin]

I'm not the biggest fan of the new Nav but I've found a lot of users are dealing with it in that they are getting used to it after a while. Interestingly our Service Management users are all fine with it and didn't care too much even though they use it constantly.

I guess in many ways people use the system to get data on it and put comments and the like. So the bigger issue I see are from Project Managers or Agile Leads.

To be honest not sure your other options, Data Centre is fine but you lose functionality too. Atlassian is also realllllllly pushing users onto cloud, I think the Data Centre cost is going up a lot for that push, which has forced us to move to cloud just for pricing.

If you do go other options definitely trial them first, ServiceNow is so popular for example, but after working with someone who configs ServiceNow I think your other options are also huge changes that I'd probably only do if you were looking for alternatives for more reasons then just UI.