The Hidden Cost of Poor Jira Governance – And How to Fix It

Jira is powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility.

What starts as a simple project tracking tool can quickly spiral into an overcomplicated, costly mess if it's not governed correctly.

And the real kicker? Most organisations don’t realise it’s happening until the licence renewal reminder lands in their inbox.

In this blog, we’ll unpack the hidden costs of poor Jira governance and, more importantly, how to get things back under control.

Licence Mismanagement – The Silent Budget Killer

Jira license costs add up fast. And if you’re not actively managing them, chances are you’re overpaying.

• Inactive users still on the books? That’s wasted spend.

• Duplicate users or test accounts? Also wasted.

• Users with too much access? That’s not just costly, it’s a security risk.

Many teams don’t have a formal offboarding process or regular audits in place, which means licenses quietly accumulate. Cleaning up your user base is one of the easiest ways to cut costs, and it doesn’t require any technical changes to Jira itself.

Quick win: Set a recurring reminder to audit user access quarterly. You’d be surprised by how much money that alone can recover. There are a few marketplace apps which suspend user access if they haven't logged on in X amount of days, so it's worth exploring if this is a big problem for you.

Custom Fields, Workflows and Schemes… Oh My

It’s easy to create new fields or workflows in Jira. Too easy.

That freedom leads to:

• Hundreds of unused custom fields

• Overcomplicated workflows with no clear ownership

• Inconsistent schemes that make reporting a nightmare

Every unnecessary element in your Jira instance adds overhead in performance, admin time, and confusion for end users. And worse, it makes the platform harder to scale.

Quick win: Review your top-used projects and assess whether the configurations are actually adding value or just legacy clutter.

Reporting That Doesn’t Actually Report Anything

One of the biggest complaints we hear from leadership is:
"We have Jira, but I still can't get the visibility I need."

That’s usually a governance issue, not a tool issue. When every team uses Jira differently, or when data is incomplete or inconsistent, reports are meaningless. Poorly governed projects lead to gaps in traceability, misaligned metrics, and an over-reliance on manual updates.

Quick win: Standardise key fields across projects (e.g. Status, Priority, Assignee) and establish mandatory usage rules to improve reporting quality. Putting time into the reporting the biggest thing, and that's something that we here ar Rapid can the burden away from.

You’re Paying for Apps You’re Not Using

The Atlassian Marketplace is brilliant, but it’s also a double-edged sword. Many organisations install apps to solve short-term problems and then forget they exist, quietly racking up unnecessary spend in the background. But the biggest issue? Marketplace app pricing is based on the total number of users in your Jira instance, not the number of users actually using the app.

It’s one of the most frustrating limitations for growing teams and a major bugbear of ours at Rapid. We’ve seen customers with hundreds of users paying full price for apps that only benefit a handful of teams. There’s no native solution to this (yet), which means the only real workaround is to segment your environments wherever possible to keep costs down and usage aligned.

Until Atlassian changes its approach, managing app sprawl and being strategic about how you structure your user base is essential if you want to keep your Marketplace spend under control.

So, what can you do about it?

We’d love to say it’s as simple as “choose Rapid”, and hey, that is a great place to start, but the reality is, there’s no one-size-fits-all fix for Jira governance.

What we can offer is a no-pressure, complimentary review of your Jira environment. We’ll help you spot the hidden costs, the configuration chaos, and the opportunities to streamline, all without locking you into anything.

Think of us as your strategic Atlassian advisers. We’re here to make sure Jira works for you, not against you, and to give you a clear, pragmatic plan to get things back on track.

Feel free to setup a call with myself to find out more :)