Feedback request: Using Confluence for project management

[Ned Lindau]

Hey Confluence admins!

My name's Ned, and I'm a Product Manager on the Confluence team.

I'm looking to chat with a few folks who have experience using Confluence to manage projects.

Specifically, I'd love to learn more about the following...

1. Do you create a space for each project, or do you create parent pages and subpages within a space for each project?
2. What are the most painful parts managing your projects in Confluence today?
3. How do you set up your Space Overview pages for project management?
4. What custom work / macros do you rely on most heavily to make your spaces useful for project management?
5. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about managing projects in Confluence, what would it be?

I would love to meet and hear your thoughts if you are open to it! Schedule some time via this link: https://calendar.app.google/mLrkpib5JchG43YX7

Even if you're unable to join a live call, I would love to hear from you in the comments below.

Hope to chat with you soon,

Ned

[Amanda Barber]

1. Do you create a space for each project, or do you create parent pages and subpages within a space for each project?
   1. Typically our projects are small enough that we have a page/subpages within our larger space 
2. What are the most painful parts managing your projects in Confluence today?
   1. Keeping things orderly/tidy - ie. moving completed projects to a new subfolder to remove from the main view for users
   2. Managing updates to the pages/ensuring pages are updated when changes are made during a call or other communication
3. How do you set up your Space Overview pages for project management?
   1. Currently, we have a "Future of XX" space where we keep our feature work
4. What custom work / macros do you rely on most heavily to make your spaces useful for project management?
   1. I mostly rely on templates for creating specs, tracking Jira tickets
5. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about managing projects in Confluence, what would it be?
   1. I'd love a way to add content blocks via a macro - like a template but just for a small portion of the page

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

I agree with @Amanda Barber

1. Keeping things orderly/tidy
2. Managing updates to the pages/ensuring pages are updated when changes are made during a call or other communication

If the content is too out of date users conclude the space is unreliable and then start going elsewhere which kills the large productivity benefits of a wiki.

In addition to being an admin I built Confluence apps to bulk edit (ie clean up) pages. Users bring up things I didn't think of, our main app is a suite of bulk editing tools called Space Content Manager.

[Jon Booth]

In a nutshell, we use templated PM structures within a space and might have multiple ones.

By templated, we actually just have a template page structure that we copy with children and then edit.  This is because I don't believe there is a good multipage template that we essentially request you to fill in details and then spin up these project management pages easily.  It would be great to have this and be able to associate it with Jira fields to make the widgets and advanced roadmap plugins all work, rather than having to go and manually set them all up each time.  As essentially some of our PM pages are very similar to a Jira dashboards but richer.

So decent multi-page templating, with the ability to configure all the Jira widgets etc would be a massive time saver.

The other thing that would be nice is to be able to rename multiple pages in a page tree, as sometimes the project names change.

Finally, parent-context sensitive search doesn't appear to be a thing.  So right now if we have "Project X", then it and all child pages say "Project X" in the title.  That way we can search for "Project X Risk Register".  However, some people forget and we might end up with 20 "Risk Register" pages...  Not very helpful.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Jon BoothI shared your comment with my team, helpful to understand further Confluence use case.

re renaming multiple pages in bulk.

You can bulk find and replace page titles (and any text) with our app Find and Replace by Easy Apps (it's also one of the features in Space Content Manager).