Automating a high-stakes HR-systems migration in Jira
A mobile application company was migrating from PeopleSoft to Workday, a move gated by user type, legal sign-off, hard deadlines, and budget. We built the multi-branch Jira workflows that ran it, with the logic encoded in post functions and automation rules so the right path fired every time.
Some migrations are hard because of the data. This one was hard because of the rules. A mobile application company was moving its HR systems from PeopleSoft to Workday, and almost nothing about the process was unconditional. Who had to approve what, in what order, by when, and at what cost all depended on the case in front of you, and getting a branch wrong carried legal and financial consequences rather than just an inconvenience.
The work was to make those rules unavoidable. We built complex, multi-layered, triggerable workflows in Jira Data Center and encoded the decision logic directly into them, so the platform enforced the process instead of relying on people to remember it under deadline pressure.
The logic ran on four axes at once, each handled in the workflow itself:
The logic, encoded in the workflow
| What drove the branch | How we handled it |
|---|---|
| User type | Conditional workflow paths per population |
| Required legal sign-off | Gated approvals via post functions |
| Time restrictions | Automation rules tied to deadlines |
| Budget constraints | Conditional logic checks before progression |
Encoded this way, the workflows did the remembering. The correct path executed automatically, the gates that mattered, legal in particular, couldn’t be skipped, and a process with real consequences became one the system could be trusted to run consistently.
It is a smaller engagement than a full transformation, but it shows a particular kind of depth: not just configuring Jira, but using its automation to carry genuinely complicated, high-consequence logic. Good automation makes the rules hard to get wrong. The platform carried the complexity here so the people running the migration didn’t have to hold it all in their heads. For more on how we work in the Atlassian platform, that is the level we build to.