Atlassian Implementation

The first and most important thing to start with when embarking on your Atlassian journey is to ensure you understand the business function being supported by the tooling.  This may seem like a simple endeavour, but it is typically the most complex part of any tooling implementation to get right.  Not only do you need to understand the, often disperse and discrete, processes being used across the business, but also how information that is inputted into the system is expected to be used, analysed and understood by its users.  Getting this wrong can disenfranchise users, increasing the change management costs involved, reducing the value of the investment of the tools, or in the worst case, causing an abject failure of the entire implementation.

The team at Echidna Solutions have regularly engaged in a formal Analysis and Design process with our customers.  Although the exact schedule and scale of these engagements can vary dependent on customer need, they will typically follow the same 3-phase process:

1. Current State Analysis - Focusing on both the business and technical state of the customer, Echidna Solutions will run Interviews and/or Workshops with various representatives from across the business, alongside independent technical analysis of any relevant existing systems.  To ensure a full picture can be formed, it is imperative that these sessions interact with both the end-users whose processes are being supported by the proposed tooling, the senior leadership that are expecting to utilise the data from the proposed tooling to drive decision-making, and the technical teams that will be responsible for the longer-term ownership and maintenance of the platforms.  Ensuring all three of these stakeholder groups feel listened to and engaged in the process is key to reducing overall change management overhead.  Finally, Echidna Solutions will formalise their findings into a document to be shared within the customer's business

2. Future State Design - Once the Current State is understood by all parties, the Future State of the estate can be designed.  Typically, Echidna Solutions will produce a draft design for the estate, which is then used to drive a series of workshops focused on various areas bespoke to the customer, such as process design, security and access design, or operational management design.  This process ensures all stakeholders are aligned to the overall plan, and any obvious challenges can be ironed out prior to committing to any particular technical implementation.

3. Gap Analysis - This is where formal project planning and minutea of implementation are refined.  Although collaborative with the customer's project management team, this is less workshop-focused than previous phases, and more on documenting plans, timelines and rollout plans.  The highest priority when designing an implementation plan is to ensure that the negative impact of change on the customer's business is controlled, managed, and minimised throughout.

The result of this process is a realistic action plan that can be taken forward either internally by the customer alone, in a collaboration with Echidna Solutions, or even with another third-party as appropriate.

To some extent, implementation is easy at this point - or at least as easy as a technology implementation can ever be.  It would be foolish to suggest that plans will never change - they absolutely will - but with a formal design process in your pocket, change can be reviewed in an educated and rational manner, ensuring that the overall goals of the programme are kept ever in-mind.  Equally, with existing engagement across all stakeholders, change management impacts are reduced, and ensuring that teams such as Operational Management and Security Operations are kept engaged throughout is key to smoothing the typical ups and downs of IT rollouts.

The team at Echidna Solutions have had great success with this approach across a variety of businesses, big and small, if you'd like to find out more, or just discuss your own unique situation with us, please contact us today.