How CHG Healthcare improved savings and service by migrating to Atlassian’s cloud products

Preparation + collaboration = a smooth, successful migration

With an accelerated timeline laid out, CHG kicked off their migration process by assembling a group of diverse stakeholders for help with evaluation, testing, and launch. The team included project managers, scrum masters, a development manager who specialized in capital expenses reports (a critical ingredient of CHG’s business), a database expert, a Jira Service Management IT support lead, and executive sponsors, along with migration managers and technical support specialists from Atlassian. 

Pulling these stakeholders together early on and keeping them engaged throughout the project was key to CHG’s success. “Stakeholder identification and management really helped us. We determined who just needed to be kept informed and who needed to be more involved,” Aaron says. “They also helped us bubble up other individuals or groups who had a vested interest.”

Once the stakeholders were in place, they outlined both CHG’s and Modio’s processes and environments, then worked with product owners to develop a migration strategy and roadmap. Streamlining CHG’s Server instances and apps was a priority during the preparation phase. Aaron says, “It’s a great opportunity – critical, in fact – to clean up the junk so when you move over, there are fewer issues, and issues that do arise are resolved much quicker.”

The cleanup process surfaced a few challenges that CHG and Atlassian worked together to solve. For example, data from one of CHG’s most critical apps wasn’t porting over correctly, so the team leaned on Development Manager DJ Frandsen and Enterprise Advocate Andrea Onuigbo, to help address the issue. DJ started running special queries while Andrea reached out to the app’s support engineers, who provided a script to run. When the script kept failing, DJ rewrote it, got the data he needed, and sent it to Andrea to migrate to the cloud. Aaron says collaboration like this was “absolutely critical to the success of this project.” 

After cleaning up their data and configurations, archiving projects and other elements that were rarely used, and auditing apps to determine which would be needed going forward, the team was ready to begin testing. CHG enlisted daily users and project stakeholders to identify bugs and missing functionality. Aaron says this thorough testing plan not only gave the team confidence in the technology, but also developed a group of champions who advocated for the migration and trained other employees. 

Frequent communication also helped keep staff informed, gain buy-in, and ease the transition. Product owners delivered monthly updates about the migration, information about how each product would help improve effectiveness, and training tips. 

Six months of planning, preparation, and communication paid off when CHG completed a smooth migration over the course of one weekend. And after they resolved a few minor, expected hiccups, the coast was clear for employees to dive in on Monday. “We went through all this work to give users this new, faster environment, so it was great to hear people say, ‘This is so much faster!’” Aaron recalls. "All in all, our team and our VP were very impressed with the results and with Atlassian.” Scrum Master Cindy Lake adds, “Being on the cloud is so nice. Having the upgrade be a one-time experience was worth everything that we went through.”

Not just faster – better

Through it all, Aaron was thankful for Atlassian’s support in helping CHG navigate the inevitable challenges that came their way and make this intricate project an immense success. “We look at our vendors as partners. We’re very collaborative and want to work together,” he says. “Atlassian is a critical system for CHG, so it was a no-brainer for us to invest in Premium support. Whenever we ran into blockers, Andrea would crowdsource solutions. She’s awesome, and I can’t say enough good things about her.”

Since migrating to Atlassian’s cloud products, CHG is not only leveraging the solutions they used on-premise – Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Bitbucket – but is also taking advantage of Opsgenie (included in Jira Service Management Cloud plans) to further support their DevOps and ITSM practices, Atlassian Guard to enable secure remote work without cumbersome VPNs, and several cloud-only features that teams have been loving. For example, all Product Experience teams are adopting roadmapping in Jira Cloud for more robust, transparent portfolio management, and business teams are now using next-gen projects independently. “Those are great!” Aaron says. “I do a 30-minute walkthrough with a project admin, show them how to build a project, and turn it over to them. They’re happy that they have flexibility and don’t have to submit requests.” 

Even implementing new integrations and features like these is easier now that CHG is on the cloud. “Our on-premise solution had a lot of firewalls and networking to traverse, so whenever we had a new integration, the API would break,” Aaron explains. “With the cloud, we can turn up APIs much quicker and deliver much faster.” 

For CHG, speed has been the biggest benefit of moving to the cloud. “Cloud seems more zippy, and the integrations between solutions seem tighter. That helps us work faster and resolve issues much quicker,” Aaron says. 

The team is working faster and better than before. By offloading maintenance and the infrastructure required for it, Operations and Engineering have saved almost $120,000 so far and up to 30 hours per week, which they can dedicate to innovation instead of administration. Plus, now that Atlassian handles patching and security updates, CHG never has to worry about vulnerabilities.

Loving the results now and looking forward to what’s next

Never resting on their laurels, CHG is living their core value of continuous improvement and looking ahead to what’s next. To build on the improvements they've already seen, CHG is planning to take their existing solutions to the next level (such as building logic into Modio’s customer service desks to automatically route requests to the right person) and open up Atlassian’s cloud products to even more teams.

Aaron believes the more teams that use Atlassian to power their work, the more they can collaborate with each other and deliver even better support for their customers. “Everybody brings a piece of the puzzle, and at the end of the day, they all fit together. Had it not been for each person on the migration team, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible,” he says. “Now, having the tool be in the cloud means it’s easier to access and use, so more people are jumping in to help. All of that trickles down into better, faster customer service.