Seamless Transition: Asana to Jira Migration for Danish Company

Explore the transformation journey of a leading Danish SaaS solution provider for restaurants as they seamlessly migrate from Asana to Jira Cloud, enhancing their project management capabilities and team collaboration.

Client: Danish company offering SaaS solutions for restaurants

Location: Denmark, Copenhagen

Scope

Migrating of tasks from Asana to Jira Cloud.  License for Jira Asana integration app. The Client chose SaaS version of our platform.

About the Client

Our client is the world’s first all-in-one platform for leading restaurants worldwide. The headquarter is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, EU. The company employs 100+ people.

About our contact (the case study is a result of an interview)

Andreas is a Product Operations Specialist – he works to minimize friction between the Product team, and the rest of the business.

GetInt: Why migrate from Asana to Jira?

Andreas: It’s about the possibilities of Jira, it just seems to fit better for our company. Asana seems to be a really good, and relatively cheap all-in-one project management tool, while Jira seems to be more focused on software development which is what we need. Jira seems to be more agile-oriented. It’s the biggest, most common tool in IT.  That’s why there are a lot of apps and integrations, and in our company, we use a lot of tools. Some of the apps we use can be integrated only with Jira (like f.e. Product Board).  Another thing is automation, which is also easier, and more effective in Jira.

Who initiated the process internally? Developers, or the Business?

A bit of both. It started with our Chief Product Officer, who hired me with 2 goals in mind to start with. Integrate Product Board, and migrate to Jira. We had really scattered bug-tracking process in Asana. Thankfully, our Engineering Managers and the Developers were also on board, and happy to migrate to Jira. Same with our CTO.

Did you perform the migration yourself, or with Atlassian Consultants?

We did it ourselves. Apart from the migration itself, my job was to plan all the integrations and automation including Stakeholder management. The biggest challenge was the bug-tracking process. We needed to understand the previous one, and the business objectives, then implement the right solution. Fortunately, I had some experience in designing similar processes in my previous organizations.

What was the scope?

Migrating thousands of tasks, and several projects from Asana to Jira. We decided to migrate all we had in Asana, so the archiver was not needed. In the end, we wanted to have one source of truth.

What was the challenge?

For us, the migration was an opportunity to start fresh, with the new tool. We designed some processes, integrations, and automation from scratch.

It’s important to find a tool that fit your case. I did several migrations before, and I know that if you try to manipulate the tool, and use it in a different way than it was designed to work, you end up with a lot of integrations with some third-party providers to make it work as you need.

That’s what I also like about Jira. It’s a very complex tool but if you learn how to manage it, you can do a lot of great things. Especially using JQL. Automation in Jira also works well.

The whole process required a lot of stakeholder management (from customer-facing support to QA’s, Product Managers, and Developers) – now we have a lot of internal agreements, and processes on how to manage a project like this one. The challenge is to make people live up to the agreements made.

So the technical process of the migration is just a small piece of the whole project.

In the migration process, the most important thing was not to lose any vital information. The reason why I decided to use GetInt was that it seemed that you have the best possible solution for migrating tasks with attachments, as well as comments, and custom fields. That was the main factor.

Additionally, I like that I could easily enable the integration – I didn’t have to close down Asana while doing the migration. The team could just continue their work in Asana, while I’m creating duplicates in Jira and all is good. That made it really simple for me. Otherwise, I would have to make a hard stop, saying that now my coworkers can’t use the tool anymore.  That was awesome.

Were you considering CSV import-export?

I thought that for the price of the GetInt tool, it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of hours of work needed to execute the CSV import-export. It would require a lot of them, for a cost higher than simply getting a license from GetInt which is there, simply ready to go. The license cost comes cheap compared to all the time saved as well as all the control we get doing the migration. What about all the things being edited in the meanwhile? It will require us to do another import-export and another one to have the data up to date. There is also a big risk of making a mistake since we won’t be doing a collective migration.

How much time did the migration process take?

The whole process took more or less 3 months. I needed to do some research first, designing the scope, stakeholder management, testing, and the final migration (which took just a few days).

Why GetInt for Asana Jira migration and integration? What can you say about the tool for others, considering it?

’m lucky to be in the position I’m in. I have a lot of time to learn new tools. The GetInt tool itself is very useful.

The field-to-field migration is easy. Overall, it’s a very complex, advanced tool – which means there are a lot of things that can go wrong. It’s a tool that requires you to test, doing trial and error to understand the whole process of the migration. It’s not a plug-and-play solution that will do the migration for you. Now, when I learned the tool, it is more plug-and-play than it was in the beginning. My colleague told me a great metaphor:

Don’t sweat it, you’re basically trying to get two people to communicate with each other, who speak different languages, and they don’t even want to communicate!

That was really wise of him 🙂 It makes a lot of sense. Asana doesn’t want us to easily migrate to Jira. And vice versa. They want us to use their tools, to keep us. That’s really important to understand that migration is not easy, even when you have the GetInt tool. The GetInt is a translator, in a sense.  A mediator between those two people, who finally start talking, starts to agree. And then, the person working with the GetInt also needs to learn. GetInt is a complex tool, there are a lot of things I can do.

In the end, I’d like to say one more thing – I really appreciate the possibility to contact a real person. You have a great support team. I find it comforting, it’s a valuable thing for me to speak to a human being. It’s giving me a face that’s representing the tool, so if I have a good conversation, which I had – I trust the tool more. I know there is a person who cares. I can say to the organization, to the manager – I spoke with Jacek, from GetInt. I speak with the people I work with. It gives me so much more confidence.

Quote:

Getint.io’s migration tool worked wonders for us, as we migrated from Asana to Jira.
It is a complex tool with loads of possibilities, so prepare for a steep learning curve. When that is said I found the tool to be very very helpful! And the team behind it, as well.
Thanks guys.

Learn more about Jira Asana integrations here.

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