Xero Transforms Service Delivery with Jira Service Management

The Opportunity

Xero’s internal support ecosystem handles more than 20,000 requests every month from over 4,600 employees across 20+ teams. As the business scaled and matured, it became clear they needed a service management platform that could evolve just as quickly, not just to handle volume, but to enhance efficiency, adaptability, and the overall user experience.

Already deeply embedded in the Atlassian ecosystem with Jira and Confluence, the move to Jira Service Management (JSM) felt like a natural next step for Xero, not a rip-and-replace, but a strategic decision to consolidate, simplify and future-proof its IT service capabilities.

JSM offered Xero a clear opportunity to bring structure to their organically grown support operations, while still allowing the agility and autonomy of their team value. What stood out most was:

• A seamless fit with existing Atlassian tools, ensuring better integration, collaboration, and reporting across teams.
• Modern and intuitive service portals that reduced guesswork and rerouted requests.
• Scalable configuration options that didn’t require constant developer input - empowering teams to own and evolve their own workflows.
• A centralised service catalogue that would support visibility and alignment across their global business.

Xero’s goal was to modernise its service management, reduce costs and provide a streamlined, scalable experience for both users and administrators. When the team started exploring options, JSM immediately stood out, both for its capabilities and its alignment with their existing Atlassian ecosystem. They were already using Jira and Confluence across the business, so the move to JSM felt natural

The company issued an RFP for a migration and consolidation project, seeking a partner with deep expertise in Atlassian tooling and large-scale, complex migrations. Elegance Group was recommended by Atlassian and completed the RFP. Its experience with large-scale migrations and its tailored proposal to help solve Xero’s curly business problem helped seal the deal.

Emily Ward, Senior Product Manager, Xero states “We wanted to ensure the Xero project team had plenty of support to complete the migration to JSM and therefore opted to work with an implementation partner rather than complete the work ourselves. We were impressed with the knowledge and expertise in the Elegance Group team. Although we are a global company most of our project team is based in NZ/AU so having key members of the EG team in NZ made it easy to collaborate in real time.”

The Solution

The project kicked off with a discovery and design phase, moved through a migration and implementation phase and then finally into delivery.

Discovery and Design

Workshops and Deep-Dive Analysis: Elegance Group ran a series of workshops with Xero’s stakeholders, mapping current pain points, cataloguing existing workflows and identifying opportunities for consolidation and automation.

Detailed Recommendations: Delivered a 30+ page report outlining a new, unified service management architecture, which was immediately accepted in full by Xero.

Migration and Implementation

Parallel Work Streams: Managed multiple streams across branding, user experience, team structures, and technical integrations, adapting as Xero’s internal teams evolved during the project.

Catalogue-Driven System: built a fully graphical, catalogue-driven service management platform using JSM, allowing dynamic updates to workflows, teams and approvals with no developer involvement required.

Sensitive Data Handling: designed robust automated confidentiality controls for sensitive HR and compliance tickets, ensuring privacy and proper routing.

Third-Party Integration: seamlessly integrated with Xero’s internal systems, including real-time identity and attribute management via Okta and Slack ticketing synchronisation.

Content Migration: automated the migration of thousands of knowledge base articles and historical tickets, preserving structure and accessibility, with no manual repair of layout or formatting required.

Change Management: Provided comprehensive training materials and supported Xero’s internal teams through the transition, ensuring minimal disruption.

Agility in Delivery

Responsive to Change: Elegance Group adapted to shifting requirements, architecting the solution to allow for the help hub to be user-centric while still maintaining the ability to structure forms and articles in terms of their resolver teams where useful

Zero Outage Cutover: orchestrated a hot migration with no system or integration downtime, allowing Xero systems to continue to feed into the new platform during the transition, the business opted for a short period of end-user outage for ease of change management

Regarding the overall project, Emily said “ This project had been ongoing at Xero for at least six months before we started working with Elegance Group. So in the end it was about 18 months worth of effort from the Xero team to get to the day where we were live in JSM with tickets coming in! We have been able to realise the cost savings that we aimed for, consolidate onto the Atlassian Platform and start to realise some of the benefits of doing that. For example we are enjoying implementing Atlassian Assist within JSM and on Slack which is starting to pick up some of the workload of answering support tickets. We plan to continue to invest effort into further optimising our content and realising more benefits in this space.”

The Impact

The results have been hugely positive and transformative.

• Cost Savings - working with EG’s Licensing team, Xero is now saving significant ongoing licensing and operational costs by consolidating Atlassian products and optimising licensing structures.
• Dramatic Simplification - reduced custom fields from 700 to 300, streamlining administration and reducing technical debt.
• Empowered Teams - Xero’s productivity team can directly manage their own teams and service offerings available in the help hub and forms in real time using a service catalog, without needing developer or other specialist input.
• Enhanced User Experience - employees simply describe their issue; the system intelligently routes requests to the right team, eliminating confusion and delays.
• Scalability and Flexibility - the new platform is designed for ongoing growth with new teams, services, and systems being added or changed with ease, supporting Xero’s evolving needs.
• Rapid, Smooth Transition - approximately 10,000 tickets were migrated with no downtime. There was minimal disruption and overall it was a seamless experience for both agents and end users.
• Future-Ready - the architecture supports advanced features such as AI-powered ticket summarisation and tone adjustment, and is set up for further automation and integration as Xero’s needs grow.

Even with shifting priorities and evolving team structures along the way, EG delivered a solution that’s robust, flexible and ready for whatever comes next. Not stopping there, the teams are working on three further work streams in parallel to continue to improve and optimise Xero’s Atlassian ecosystem.

The teamwork and relationship between the teams at Xero and Elegance Group contributed greatly to the project success, Emily commented “We have a very strong and trusting working relationship with members of the EG team embedded into our Atlassian sites to provide hands on keyboards support. Throughout the project we included EG colleagues within the project team working very closely together. We’ve been most impressed by their breadth and depth of knowledge within the Atlassian apps, responsiveness to questions and asks and willingness to tackle challenges and come up with solutions.”

Talk to one of our team today about transforming your service management. Contact us here.