Rethinking Your Tooling Strategy: Insights from Rick Earl

Tight budgets. Tool chaos. Growing expectations. Sound familiar?

In our latest Strategic Software webinar, Elegance Group’s Co-Founder and Principal Consultant, Rick Earl, tackled the real-world challenges many organisations face when trying to do more with less. If you missed the live session, here’s a summary of the key takeaways, and why now is the time to rethink your SaaS strategy.

The Case for Rationalisation

The first step? Shift your mindset from “add another app” to “make the most of what we’ve already got.” Rick broke rationalisation down into three major drivers:

• Cost vs. Capability: It’s not about cutting tools blindly, it’s about understanding what’s essential and what’s duplicative.
• Consolidation with Confidence: Rationalisation often means fewer tools, but not fewer features. For instance, Jira Service Management (JSM) now includes functionality previously only available via third-party tools like PagerDuty.
• Smarter Investment: Sometimes, spending a little more upfront, whether on partner support or strategic tooling, can save you significantly over time.

Why Roadmapping Matters

Tool rationalisation isn’t a one-time exercise, it’s a continuum. Rick introduced the idea of a “roadmap of roadmaps,” a living framework that helps you align tooling decisions with business strategy, economic shifts, regulatory changes, and team readiness.

Key factors to consider include:

• Organisational culture and change appetite
• Economic signals and vendor behaviour
• Regulatory shifts (like new data residency and accessibility requirements)
• Tool overlap, underutilisation, and integration complexity
• Internal capability and how to build it over time

In short: great roadmapping helps you decide when to invest, hold, or pivot.

Unlocking Under-utilised Value

One of the most practical parts of the session came as Rick highlighted specific areas where organisations could reduce spend without reducing value. Examples included:

• Atlassian Goals: A powerful (and free) way to track strategic OKRs and align team efforts; no premium portfolio tools required.
• Native Automation & Guest Access: Minimise license spend while still empowering change approvers, testers, or collaborators who don’t need full access.
• Low-Tech Wins: From CSV exports to live Confluence embeds, Rick showed how simple data tracking can uncover unused licenses and boost adoption with no add-ons required.

Strategic Consolidation in Action

Rick shared compelling use cases for consolidating from tools like:

• PagerDuty → to native JSM on-call and incident management
• ServiceNow and Zendesk → to consolidated enterprise service management in JSM
• Standalone IDPs (like Backstage or Cortex) → to Atlassian Compass, already integrated with your development stack

It’s not about sacrificing functionality, it’s about reducing complexity and total cost of ownership.

Empower Your People, Not Just Your Platforms

Ultimately, Rick emphasised that successful rationalisation isn’t only about tools, it’s about people. The most resilient organisations are those where internal teams take ownership of their systems, with partners playing a flexible, on-demand role to guide and support (not control).

Empowering your team builds:

• Long-term capability
• Faster adoption
• Less reliance on vendors
• More flexibility when change inevitably comes

Final Thought

“Your success depends on how your tooling aligns with your mission, people, and budget.” – Rick Earl

If you’re under pressure to streamline costs, consolidate tools, and plan smarter, this isn’t just a challenge. It’s an opportunity.

You can catch the recording of Rick’s webinar on our YouTube channel - here.

And stay tuned for our next Strategic Software webinar in the series, where we’ll speak with a global fintech procurement leader about how procurement is driving smarter tech decisions.