Two thirds of their Jira seats didn’t need a Jira licence
An ASX-listed utilities companies was about to commit to a multi-year Jira renewal for 1,200 seats, more than they already held. We ran a year of their activity through Subble and classified every user by what they actually did. Only 189, the administrators who configure Jira and the leads who run delivery, were doing work a licence is really for. The hundreds who looked busy were only creating and commenting on issues, exactly the work their ServiceNow ticket system already carries both ways. The rest had gone read-only or quiet.
- 68%
- of their paid Jira seats no longer need a licence
- 690
- seats taken off a 1,200-seat renewal
- ~A$93k
- recovered every year, on one subscription
The challenge
The company ran Jira across two instances, with around 1,000 users on paid Jira Premium seats, an annual bill north of A$135,000. Every renewal the same question came up and nobody could answer it: who actually needs a Jira seat? Headcount and licence count had drifted apart for years. Plenty of people held a Premium seat purely to raise the odd ticket, and plenty more had stopped logging in altogether, but there was no way to tell those people apart from the engineers living in Jira every day. Without that picture, the safe move was always to renew the lot. This time the stakes were higher: the deal on the table was a multi-year agreement for 1,200 seats, locking in years of growth they had no evidence they needed. That is where Subble came in. We identified that most of those seats were not doing work that needed Jira at all.
What Subble did
We worked with their team to understand the personas that actually existed in their Jira, then used Subble's behavioural data to pull a custom report that placed every one of their roughly 1,000 paid seats into one of them.
Administrator
KeepConfigures Jira: workflows, schemes, fields, projects, releases.
Lead
KeepRuns the agile process: sprints, boards, plans.
Contributor
ReplaceComments on and updates issues, but that activity arrived through the ticketing integration.
Ticket Creator
ReplaceOnly ever raises tickets. The natural fit for an intake form.
Passive
Keep for nowLogs in to read, never to edit. Kept for now, until the reports that replace that view are in place.
Inactive
ReplaceNo activity at all in the window. Reclaim.
The split nobody could see before
Only 189 seats, the administrators and leads, were doing work that had to live in Jira. Another 133 just read from Jira, and we kept those for now. That left 690 raising tickets and leaving comments, all of it already captured by the ticketing integration.
The fix: a form with a two-way comment sync
ServiceNow was a birthright system at the company, already in every employee's hands. We built a form on top of it that opens a Jira issue and keeps comments synced both ways, so the people raising tickets and commenting carry on exactly as before, without holding a Jira licence.
Step 1
Classify every seat by behaviour
Subble read a year of real Jira activity across both instances and sorted all of their roughly 1,000 paid seats into six personas, from system administrators down to people who had never logged in.
Step 2
Find the work that has to happen in Jira
Only two personas were doing work that could not happen anywhere else: the administrators configuring Jira and the leads running the sprints and boards. That was 189 seats. Most of the rest were raising tickets, leaving comments, or only reading.
Step 3
Lean on a system everyone already had
ServiceNow was a birthright system, provisioned to every employee. The form opens a Jira issue and keeps comments synced both ways under one service identity, so a reply in Jira lands back in ServiceNow and the other way around.
Step 4
Reclaim the freed seats
That took 690 seats off the renewal straight away. The administrators and leads stayed put, and the view only users keep their access while we build the reports that replace it.
The result
68%
of their roughly 1,000 paid Jira seats no longer need a licence
690 seats
taken off the renewal, without touching an administrator or lead
~A$93k / year
recovered on Jira so far, recurring at every renewal from here on
0 disruption
for the people still working in Jira, with view only users next in line
“Subble showed us, person by person, who was actually running things in Jira and who was just raising tickets or leaving comments. Once we saw that nearly everything outside the admins and leads already ran through our ticket queue, moving them to ServiceNow was an easy call.”
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