How to Improve Content & Task Management Efficiency Across Teams in Jira and Confluence?

[Fin Allen]

Hi everyone,
We’re currently trying to optimize our workflow for managing content production and marketing tasks across multiple teams using Jira and Confluence. As our workload grows, managing timelines, collaboration, and asset organization is becoming more challenging.

We’re also analyzing audience traffic coming from external media platforms (for example, we are reviewing: http://onstreams.co.za) and want to align our planning process better using Atlassian tools.

I’d really appreciate guidance on:

• Best Jira configurations or templates for content planning & scheduling

• Recommended Confluence structures for organizing ongoing content projects

• Tools or integrations you’d suggest for improving productivity across marketing and content teams

• Tips for building workflows that connect visibility, tasks, and reporting

How are others managing content pipelines efficiently with Jira + Confluence?
Any examples or setups would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance!

[Nikola Perisic]

Hi @Fin Allen 

• I would suggest going with the Jira business project because from everything that you are mentioning, you don't need Agile (kanban and scrum). Do not include more than 5-7 statuses in your workflow. Everything above it is making it less intuitive. For Jira, you got the Content management template that you can use that comes with predefined template. If you don't like it, refer to the above. Include Confluence space in your Jira, this would the Pages option in your navigation for the documentation reference. Automate as many things as possible. One automation rule could be based on created work item to have a page in Confluence being created. You have the automation rule templates. 
• For Confluence, I would say to keep everything in a structure, use folders. For a quicker navigation, use page tree macro so people can navigate through the pages easily. Assuming you are on cloud, use Confluence whiteboards for things such as processes, logic flows and more. You can connect your Jira work items from your business project to your Confluence whiteboard.Since you are in the content creation space, I would also say to use Loom if you have it as well - this is a video recording product acquired by Atlassian that you can embed in your Confluence pages to explain some things instead sitting in meeting and wasting time. 
• As for the productivity improving, this depends on how are you managing the teams. This is more of a soft skill rather than a hard skill. What drives the productivity to those people? I would start with that question, then pivot more.
• As mentioned before, your workflows shouldn't be that complicated unless it's necessary. For visibility, you always can create dashboards and share it with your teams. You have plenty of options ranging from pie charts, filter results, two dimensional filter statistics and more. What data are you looking to present? To who? Reports are similar to dashboards, but they cannot be shared with others.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Fin Allen content management was mentioned by @Tomislav Tobijas and @Nikola Perisic. This is a focus of Confluence.

A dirty little secret is that nobody wants to manage content. They both gave some excellent tips on structuring Jira and Confluence, this a already hard to do well and essential.

Longer term you have to figure out a way to manage the content. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, it's a problem we all have, and we build a suite of tool to help deal with it with bulk actions, the app is called Space Content Manager.

Lower hanging fruit like ensuring names of things are correct. It seems simple, but it's tricky and can lead to confusion. Atlassian changed 'issue' to 'work item' and 'project' to 'space', an example. Worse if people do not believe Confluence is relatively accurate (perfection is a goal not a reality) they will disengage and back to email and other silos.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Fin Allen ,

On top of what Nikola said about business spaces and Confluence hierarchy, if you need to track your/teams' time, you could also check Marketplace solutions such as Tempo or BigPicture (or simply native time tracking). It's all quite useful if you want to estimate work and check how long you have spent on each item.

As for Confluence, you could use clear hierarchies such as 

• Overview
  • Project Plans
    • Asset Library
      • Meeting Notes

and assign “Confluence gardeners” to periodically review and tidy up content. 🧹

Maybe a good point of reference would also be Atlassian Learning, where you can find courses such as Collaborate effectively with Jira and Confluence together and get some ideas out of that. 📚

From my experience, marketing teams usually have a couple of Confluence and Jira spaces where they manage everything they do. Jira is for task tracking, and Confluence is for content management. 
The detailed structure in the end depends on how your organization and processes are set up.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tobi