Weekly Wonder: The Power of Templates - Streamlining Processes in Your Atlassian Environment

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Hi CUG members! 👋

As a Company User Group (CUG) leader, you’re constantly looking for ways to reduce friction for your members while increasing consistency and quality across teams.

One of the most underrated tools in your Atlassian toolkit is templates. From Jira issue and project templates to Confluence page templates and repeatable plays, templates help your community move faster, reduce errors, and make best practices the default.

Below are a handful of ways that templates can supercharge your community.

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1. Standardize common workflows to reduce re‑work

When every team invents its own way of doing the same thing - running sprints, managing requests, or tracking risks - you end up with confusion and duplicated effort.

By adopting Jira project templates (for Scrum, Kanban, service management, etc.) and aligning on a few “golden paths,” you give teams a consistent starting point.

That consistency cuts onboarding time, reduces configuration drift, and makes it far easier for CUG members to share reports, dashboards, and lessons learned because everyone is speaking the same “process language.”

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2. Turn tribal knowledge into reusable Confluence templates

Treat retros, kickoffs, risk logs, and project plans often live in someone’s personal space or a one‑off page.

Confluence page templates turn those “one-off wins” into reusable assets that anyone in your community can adopt. Start by capturing your best example pages (e.g., a strong project poster, sprint retrospective, or job description), then convert them into team or global templates.

Over time, you’ll build a curated library that helps new leaders get up to speed quickly and keeps quality high even as your CUG grows.

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3. Streamline intake and approvals with structured request templates

Whether it’s event proposals, access requests, or change approvals, poorly structured intake slows everything down.

Use Jira issue templates and Confluence request forms to define exactly what information is needed up front: business context, impact, dates, owners, and approvals. This reduces back‑and‑forth, speeds up decisions, and helps CUG members avoid “inbox chaos.”

For recurring community processes—like event submissions or content ideas—create a clearly named “Request template” and promote it as the standard entry point.

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4. Align events and initiatives with repeatable planning templates

CUG events, workshops, and campaigns tend to follow the same arc: define goals, identify your audience, craft the message, plan logistics, and measure impact.

Capture this once as a Confluence event planning template (agenda, roles, milestones, promotion checklist, and post‑event survey) and reuse it across your community.

This not only saves time for individual leaders but also makes it much easier for new organizers to step in, follow the template, and run high‑quality events from day one.

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5. Combine templates with Atlassian Team Playbook “Plays”

Templates are even more powerful when they’re rooted in proven ways of working. The Atlassian Team Playbook offers step‑by‑step “Plays” (like Project Poster, DACI, Retrospectives, and Working Agreements) that map naturally to Confluence and Jira templates.

Encourage CUG members to pair a Play (the how) with a template (the where & what). For example, run the Project Kick‑Off Play while filling out a project poster template in Confluence, and then spin up a Jira project using an appropriate project template to track the work.

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6. Use templates to reinforce governance without heavy-handed control

Governance doesn’t have to mean rigid rules and endless reviews. By baking recommended fields, labels, and sections into templates, you gently guide teams toward good data hygiene and reporting without adding overhead.

For example, a Jira Scrum project template can standardize issue types and workflows, while a Confluence status update template can ensure each update includes scope, risks, dependencies, and next steps.

Over time, this makes portfolio‑level reporting and cross‑team collaboration significantly easier for everyone in your CUG.

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Bringing it all together

Templates help you transform “the way we do things here” from something informal and fragile into something repeatable, discoverable, and easy to adopt.

As a Company User Group leader, you can champion a small library of curated templates across Jira and Confluence, pair them with proven Plays from the Atlassian Team Playbook, and encourage members to share back the templates that work best in their own environments.

To help your community go deeper, share these resources from the Atlassian web site in your next meeting, newsletter, or community post:

• Jira templates

• Confluence Templates

• Atlassian Team Playbook

• Work Life by Atlassian

• Atlassian Community

Encourage your members to experiment with one or two templates this month, then bring their experiences back to the group.

Over time, your CUG can become a hub for the most effective, reusable templates across your organization.