Helping a leading challenger bank handle IT issues more efficiently and effectively

A leading UK challenger bank provides digital financial services to businesses and consumers, using technology to deliver fast, reliable and customer-focused banking services.

A Jira server in need of attention

Like many growing financial organisations, the bank relied on Atlassian’s Jira to manage IT projects, track issues and resolve defects across its technology teams. Its Jira Server environment had supported the business for many years, but with Atlassian ending support for Server products, it was time to review the future of the platform.

More info: Atlassian EOL announcement for Server products

The organisation was already working with Sourcesense through our Sustain business-as-usual support service, making us a natural partner to guide the next stage of its Atlassian journey.

A move to the cloud with Jira Software

We recommended a move to Jira Cloud, to save on administration effort and hosting costs, and used Atlassian Access to integrate Funding Circle’s Okta authentication for trouble-free identity management. Then we set about making Jira more efficient for the lender.

One key area was the number of  Jira Service Management agent licences being used for teams that were not operating traditional service desks.

Working closely with the customer’s IT teams, we identified multiple service management functions that could instead be delivered through Jira Software, reducing the number of agent licences required while maintaining the same user experience.

Our review covered areas including customer portals, request participants, service level agreements, queues, automation, comment visibility, permissions, email integrations, notifications and collaboration integrations. By redesigning these capabilities within Jira Cloud, we delivered a more efficient and cost-effective solution.

A trouble-free migration and more efficient operations

The migration was not without its challenges, with existing applications and automations proving complex to migrate the data and at times requiring manual intervention in the plan. And of course, everything had to be validated before user acceptance testing. 

Doing the work in-house would have been time-consuming and led to individuals specialising away from their skill sets - particularly with the company’s many workflow automations, as they had to be carefully mapped and tested on the cloud before and after entering production.

However, we were able to complete the task without problems, carrying out as much preparatory work as possible within our business-as-usual service to minimise the cost. By the end of the assignment, we had migrated 71 Jira projects and archived a further 41.

The successful migration means the customer no longer needs to worry about the Jira server having no formal support cover from Atlassian and has a much more efficient and cost-effective environment for IT service management. The high availability of the Atlassian cloud platform has also brought benefits to the business.

The (migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud) went extremely smoothly, with very little noise following. It’s been very much recognised as a great success by the business. The preparedness, professionalism, and responsiveness of the team at Sourcesense was superb.”

Head of Engineering, UK Challenger Bank

Moving to Jira Cloud has given the organisation a modern platform that supports its continued growth while enabling its technology teams to focus on delivering value rather than maintaining infrastructure.

About Us

Sourcesense is a team of dedicated Atlassian specialists with experience across a wide range of industries. We help organisations modernise, optimise and scale their Atlassian environments, enabling teams to work more efficiently and achieve better business outcomes.