Cleaning up users and user groups is one of the more straightforward tasks in Jira cleanup, although it may require some manual outreach. It consists of identifying and deleting inactive users, consolidating user groups, where possible, and confirming their permission schemes.
It’s a best practice to delete users when they leave the company, both for security reasons and to free up user licenses, but it doesn’t always happen. Pull a list of users by the last login date. Then, confirm that users who haven’t logged in recently are either no longer employed by your company or have moved to roles where they no longer need seats, before removing them.
Audit your user groups and permission schemes. Identify any user groups that overlap and see if these can be consolidated. Then, confirm whether each group needs global permissions or project permissions, and refine their access.
Any Jira instance that has been in use for several years will accumulate inactive projects and issues. Maybe work on them has been completed, or the organization decided not to pursue them. Whatever the reason, they tend to clutter the system, cause it to return inaccurate results, and slow it down. Following your company's policies and audit history, it is possible to either delete or archive inactive projects and issues. More recent versions of Jira make it easy to archive and restore projects and issues, which minimizes clutter but might not result in the performance gains you would see if you deleted them altogether.
Over time, it’s common for the number of workflows within an instance to grow, especially in organizations that don’t have a formal governance board or have decentralized tool administration. It’s also common for teams that do similar types of work to have duplicate workflows or workflows with slight variations that can be consolidated.
The fewer workflows there are, the easier the system is to maintain and support, so deleting inactive workflows and workflow schemes is a good first step in overall workflow cleanup. You can use an app like Admin Toolbox for Jira to identify inactive workflows, then use Atlassian scripts to delete inactive workflows and workflow schemes.
Too many custom fields are one of the most common problems we see, and it can have a big impact on Jira instance performance, particularly around indexing. There are some things you can do, though, to clean them up, including deleting unused or unnecessary ones and consolidating existing ones.
Jira also allows you to identify those custom fields that take the longest time to index. From there, you can look at the configuration of the fields to determine if there are ways you can improve it, so it indexes more quickly. You can also look at custom field context—whether it is global or only assigned to specific projects and issues. Custom fields that have been assigned global context but do not require it can then be optimized.
To learn more, download our whitepaper, Practical Recommendations for Cleaning and Organizing Jira, JSM, and Confluence.