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Governance & compliance
Taming the Sprawl - Governance to Jira/Confluence Instance
Bringing governance to a 552-user Jira and Confluence estate — and giving the data back its credibility.
01
The challenge
Five years of growth with zero guardrails had turned a 552-user Jira and Confluence estate into a maze: 1,134 custom fields, 168 workflows, 612 Confluence spaces, and permission schemes layered over years of ad-hoc changes. In about fourteen weeks — phased, with zero disruption to live teams — we removed roughly three-quarters of the clutter and gave 552 people data they can finally believe.
This fast-growing tech company let every team self-serve in Jira and Confluence. Helpful at first — until “just make a new field” had happened about eleven hundred times. Custom-field sprawl ran past 1,100 fields, most of them duplicates of each other. 168 workflows meant no two teams worked alike. Nobody could say who could see what. More than 600 Confluence spaces left no single source of truth, leadership reports were stitched together by hand in Excel, and the day-to-day was slow boards, sluggish search and anxious audits.
02
Our approach
We didn't rip and replace — we untangled, and we measured the mess before touching it. Before changing a single setting we ran a full configuration audit and captured a baseline from native admin exports: 1,134 custom fields, 168 active workflows, 612 Confluence spaces. You can't prove an improvement you never measured, and we don't ask clients to take our word for it.
Then we set the rules of the road before cleaning — lightweight enough to follow, strong enough to last. A governance charter named a tool owner, stood up a small product council, and versioned the change policy. A naming taxonomy gave projects consistent keys and prefixes so reporting rolls up cleanly. A simple role model — requestor, contributor, maintainer, admin — replaced 53 bespoke permission schemes with 6. And configuration standards added a custom-field registry, a shared screen and scheme library, and a request path that stops sprawl at the door.
The cleanup itself ran in five moves: audit and quantify, consolidate duplicates into shared standards, archive 104 stale projects and 325 spaces with their owners' sign-off, standardize on the scheme library and Confluence space templates, then automate and enable. Teams migrated in place, in phases — nobody lost work or missed a sprint.
Governance isn't bureaucracy. It's what makes your tools trustworthy.
03
What we built
- Governance charter & RACIA named tool owner, a small product council and a versioned change policy. Decisions, not guesswork.
- Configuration standards & field registryA custom-field registry and a request path that stops sprawl at the door.
- Permission & scheme library53 bespoke permission schemes rationalized into 6, plus a shared screen and scheme library.
- Workflow pattern catalogConsistent, reusable patterns in place of 168 one-off workflows.
- Confluence space architecture & templatesOne source of truth instead of 612 sprawling spaces.
- Automation packField-hygiene rules and alerts that keep the estate clean without policing it.
- Admin runbook & hands-on trainingSo the team can maintain the model long after hand-over.
- Marketplace app rationalization21 apps reviewed and reduced to 13.
04
The results
Measured against a 30-day pre-engagement baseline and re-pulled at go-live plus 90 days. Config counts from native admin exports, load times from timed page-load sampling, retrieval gains from timed studies of real users finding a known document.
- 72% fewer custom fields1,134 down to 318 — the number-one driver of sprawl, gone.
- 63% faster board loads6.2s to 2.3s on the heaviest boards, at p90.
- 58% faster knowledge retrievalTimed task study: finding the right Confluence document.
- 90% less reporting effortMonthly leadership reporting fell from 3 days to roughly 3 hours.
- 64% fewer admin requests“Can you make a field?” tickets dropped sharply.
- 94% governance adoptionNew projects spun up from approved templates across the first 90 days.
Behind the headline numbers, the estate itself got smaller: active workflows fell 87% (168 to 22), issue types 72% (86 to 24), screens and schemes 82% (214 to 38), permission schemes 89% (53 to 6), Confluence spaces 53% (612 to 287), and Marketplace apps 38% (21 to 13).
05
In their words
For the first time, our dashboards agree with reality. We deleted the spreadsheet we used to hand-stitch reports together — and nobody misses it. — Head of PMO
Avaratak untangled five years of config sprawl without breaking a single team's workflow. Boards load fast, audits are boring again, and I finally trust our permissions. — Platform Administrator
552 users, one governance model
Bring order to your Atlassian instance
If your Jira or Confluence has grown into something no one can fully navigate, governance is what turns sprawl back into a system. Start with a governance and configuration health check and we'll chart the way out.