yasoon meets customers: Project management with Jira and Microsoft 365 in the automotive industry

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

At Atlassian Team in Anaheim, we spoke with Brian Helms from MotoRad Ltd. about how his team uses Jira alongside Microsoft 365.

Brian wanted to move away from email-heavy project management. Jira's Kanban boards, backlogs, and epic grouping gave Brian's team a clearer way to organize work and maintain momentum without constant oversight.

However, the team also faced a familiar Jira administration question: who needs to work directly in Jira, and who only needs to contribute information or participate in conversations?

The challenge: collaborating beyond licensed Jira users

MotoRad uses Microsoft as its main communication environment, while a smaller group works directly in Jira. Providing full Jira access to every occasional contributor was not the right fit for their use case.

This created a gap. Core users could manage work in Jira, but they still needed input from colleagues who spent most of their day in Microsoft environments. MotoRad addressed this by connecting Jira and Microsoft Teams through Microsoft 365 for Jira.

Jira users could create or connect Teams conversations to Jira work items, while other participants continued collaborating through the familiar Teams interface. This helped the core team retain relevant discussion alongside the Jira work item. For MotoRad, this reduced reliance on email and allowed Jira access to remain focused on the people who needed to manage work directly.

Benefits of connecting Jira and Microsoft Teams for manufacturing teams

Linking conversations to Jira work items reduced time spent switching tools, searching through threads, and manually transferring context. With communication and work tracking connected, the team had less information to hold across separate systems, reducing cognitive load while keeping Jira as the structured record of work.

For Brian's team, this improved cost management by limiting direct Jira access to those who needed it, while the wider organization could see Jira-supported workflows in action, helping build internal buy-in for broader Jira adoption.

What other Jira admins can take from this

A practical starting point is to map users into groups: people who manage work in Jira, colleagues who contribute through Teams or Outlook, and stakeholders who mainly need visibility.

This helps clarify who needs Jira access and which integration features are useful. Next, test one workflow with a small group. For example, let Jira users start a Teams conversation directly from a work item, while keeping ownership, status, priorities, and key decisions recorded in Jira.

If visibility is a main need, add the Jira board to the relevant Teams channels. Also define which conversations or decisions must be recorded in Jira. Starting with familiar tools such as Teams and Outlook allows colleagues to experience the value of Jira-supported workflows without changing their entire way of working at once. This can build internal buy-in and support broader Jira adoption over time.

Thanks to Brian for sharing these insights. It is great to see how our customers are integrating tools to solve practical challenges and set the stage for future growth. We hope this story is helpful for other teams facing similar challenges.

Full disclosure: I'm Britta, and I work at yasoon, the company behind Microsoft 365 for Jira. I had the pleasure of interviewing our customer Brian. The views he shared are his own and do not necessarily represent or imply an official endorsement by MotoRad Ltd.