"For 25 years RHEL development happened in Bugzilla. That all changed on September 4th, 2023 when all 1500 engineers and their support teams switched Jira. Here's how we did it and how it paves the way for Agile Innovation."

In 2022, a team was formed to start thinking about doing the unthinkable–completely changing the development tracking process for the over 1500 engineers and their support teams building Red Hat’s flagship product, RHEL. The team was tasked with outlining existing processes and mapping them into new tooling.

It wasn’t just about doing what the other tooling did, but taking advantage of new functionality. But, even with the bright and shiny new features, this was no easy feat. It was a task that required coordination, collaboration, and buy-in from all levels within the organization. This talk will take the audience through the process of “the great migration” of RHEL into Jira as the speakers share insights and best practices for managing communication, process improvement, and change for a product team with 20+ years of process ingrained in their everyday work. This talk uses the migration of RHEL into Jira as a proxy for change management best practices as we take the insights forward to find novel ways to implement complex changes across the Red Hat Portfolio.