By: Bonnie Beyer
When organizations struggle with Jira or Confluence, the root cause is rarely the tool. It’s the lack of a governing structure around how the tools are used, changed, supported, and scaled. Over time, even well-intentioned teams accumulate inconsistent workflows, redundant projects, unmanaged fields, and one-off configurations that make the system harder to maintain and nearly impossible to trust.
Good governance solves this. It creates clarity, stability, and a predictable way for teams to work across the entire Atlassian ecosystem. It also stops the cycle of reactive changes and patchwork solutions that drain time and energy.
If you rely on Atlassian tools at scale, here is what “good” governance actually looks like.
Start with the Foundation: Representative Decision-Making
Real governance is not administrators meeting about Jira settings. A strong governance board represents the full system. It includes administrators, business stakeholders, and an executive sponsor who helps align decisions with organizational priorities.
This board needs a clear mission, a defined scope, and a consistent operating model. Decisions must be documented. Standards must be explicit. Most importantly, the board must take a system-wide view that prevents isolated decisions from causing downstream issues.
This board becomes the decision engine for the entire environment. When it is strong, everything else becomes easier.
What the Governance Board Oversees
Governance spans four major domains. Together, they form the structure needed to scale the Atlassian ecosystem without losing control or velocity.
1. Intentional, Scalable System Design
A healthy Jira environment doesn’t happen by accident. It is deliberately structured.
Effective system design includes:
- Clear user group management and limited admin access
- A defined Jira project topology and issue hierarchy
- Shared workflows, field configurations, permissions, and automations
- Guardrails for Marketplace apps and integrations
- Architecture designed for scale and maintainability
This is how organizations avoid the “wild west” of disconnected configurations that break reporting and make Jira feel unmanageable.
2. Rigorous Change Management
Many organizations make direct changes in production with no intake process, no testing, and no accountability. This almost always leads to broken automations, lost data, and instability.
A strong governance model uses:
- A structured intake, review, approval, rollout, and rollback process
- Decisions based on the underlying purpose of the change, not the surface request
- Sandbox testing before production changes
- Planned release cycles
- Adoption practices grounded in frameworks like ADKAR
This discipline dramatically reduces disruptions and makes the system more reliable.
3. A Structured Support Model
Without a support model, every admin becomes a bottleneck and every team creates its own workarounds.
A sustainable support structure includes:
- Clear ownership and SLAs
- Defined escalation paths
- A central intake system
- Transparent communication for user-impacting issues
This shifts organizations from constant firefighting to predictable, high-quality support.
4. Enablement and Training
Governance doesn’t work unless people understand how the system is meant to operate. Successful organizations invest in:
- Role-based training and onboarding
- A shared vocabulary across teams
- Playbooks and documented ways of working
- A Community of Practice to reinforce standards
Enablement is the key to long-term sustainability. It prevents regression and reduces reliance on individual experts.
Governance Must Be Documented
A governance model only succeeds when decisions are captured in one place. Scattered documentation leads to confusion, rework, and knowledge loss as staff changes.
Effective documentation includes:
- Architecture decisions
- Standards
- Change approvals
- Naming conventions
- Governance board outputs
As part of our Governance Transformation Assessment, Valiantys provides a purpose-built Confluence space template that centralizes this information and protects the organization from turnover and loss of institutional memory.
I showed a brief walkthrough of this space during a recent webinar. If you want an example of how a governance space can be structured and maintained, you can see it here: Atlassian Governance Board Confluence Template Demo.
Where Valiantys Helps
Many organizations assume they have a tooling problem. What they actually have is a governance problem. Valiantys helps establish the structure, discipline, and clarity needed to run the Atlassian ecosystem like an enterprise platform.
With the right governance model in place, teams move faster, administrators gain control, and leadership finally gets the visibility and predictability they’ve been missing.
If your Atlassian environment has grown beyond what your current structures can support, it may be time to rethink how governance works in your organization. I’d be happy to walk you through what “good” looks like.
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