Case study 02
Consolidating 7 acquired companies and 2,300+ users into one unified Atlassian stack
An IT Service Provider scaling rapidly through M&A, merging five Atlassian environments and two non-Atlassian platforms into a single operational architecture.
Migration Tactics
M&A Consolidation
Governance
Process Alignment
Delivered 2023
Role: Migration Architect + Advisor
2,300+
Users onboarded
5 Atlassian + 2 non-Atlassian
7 → 1
Environments consolidated
Single source of truth
10+ → 2
Marketplace apps retained
8+ apps dropped or replaced
Phased
Company-by-company waves
Zero operational disruption
The situation & strategy
Managing M&A scale, stakeholder friction, and process alignment.
Rapid acquisition created an unmanageable fragment of tooling: seven companies operating across five Atlassian environments and two external platforms. Every entity defended its own way of working, custom fields, workflows, and niche Marketplace apps. The core challenge was unifying 2,300+ users into a single Atlassian stack while preserving the parent company’s operational foundation without alienating newly acquired teams.
I was brought in as migration architect and advisor to structure the consolidation roadmap, manage multi-stakeholder negotiations, align time-tracking and billing processes, and execute the migration company by company.
The honest limit
Consolidating M&A environments is 20% technical and 80% governance. Getting everyone on one page required real give-and-take: the parent company couldn’t impose 100% of its existing setup without blocking adoption, while acquired teams had to surrender custom workflows and adapt to standardized time-tracking. Cutting 10+ add-ons down to just two required tough, documented trade-offs with business leads in phase one.