Tips for all teams: Agency collaboration in Jira

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👋 G’day Atlassian community! We’re back with another post in our “Tips for all teams” series where we spotlight how all teams can benefit from Jira.

🔎 We’ll be exploring a variety of personas and use cases paired with quick, helpful tips to inspire new ways of using Jira that you may not have considered before. Provide feedback, give additional tips, or even share your own Jira stories in the comments below – we highly value your feedback.

✨ Explore other use cases:

• Work intake

• Content creation

• GTM launch

• Campaign management

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Collaborating with agencies just got easier. Here’s how.

Working with creative partners – whether it’s a design shop, media crew, or PR firm – is a great way to bring in fresh ideas and move faster as a team. But even with outside help, keeping everything on track can be tricky. From writing solid briefs to managing feedback and approvals, collaborating with agencies takes a quite a bit coordination.

The good news? Jira can make it way easier. ✨

In this post, we’ll share some simple, practical tips to help you and your agency partners stay in sync and get great work out the door.

 

Let’s see in action:

Say you’re a marketing team partnering with a social media marketing agency (let’s call them Trendly). The process might look like this:

• Share the brief: send over campaign goals, timelines, and brand guidelines

• Kick things off: hold a call to align on scope, channels, and creative direction

• Wait while assets are made: Trendly gets to work creating social content

• Review drafts: check files stores in a shared tool

• Give feedback: go back and forth to refine copy and visuals

• Publish: once approved, Trendly schedules and posts the content

It works – but it’s clunky.

Maybe your team is chasing down updates, or struggling to keep track of the latest version. Change requests get buried in email threads, and deadlines slip because no one has the full picture.

💡 That’s when you start thinking: what if Trendly could just work in Jira with us?

 

Here’s how that might look like:

1. Give your agency the right access. Invite agency users to the projects that matter, and use user groups, project role types, and permissions to make sure they only see and do what’s relevant to their work.

2. Start strong with a shared campaign brief. Jira and Confluence work better together when you’re kicking off a campaign. Use Confluence to capture ideas, build out the brief, and align with your agency. Then let Rovo – your AI teammate – help turn that plan into Jira tasks. 

3. Collaborate in context as work moves forward. As the agency builds out assets and deliverables, they can share progress, tag reviewers, and ask questions – all directly in Jira. No more digging through emails or threads to stay in the loop.

• Custom workflows: Need feedback rounds in your workflow? Set up a review and approval flow that works for everyone.

• Automations: Cut down no busywork by automating task assignments, reminders, and status updates based on your team’s needs.

• Forms: Don’t want to distract your agency with one-off asks? Set up a single form your team can use to submit ad hoc requests. Requests stay organized, and the agency can better prioritize incoming work. [Read the use case: Work Intake]

• Atlassian Intelligence: Use AI to speed things up: summarize comment threads, clean up tasks, and pull in relevant Confluence pages.

4. See how agency work fits into the bigger picture. With Jira Plans, you can connect your agency’s work happening across product, sales, and creative, and beyond. Everything comes together in one place, giving you a clear view of timelines, dependencies, and how it ladders up to your goals.

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🔑 Key benefits of using Jira for agency collaboration

• Stay in sync: Stay aligned without the constant check-ins. When everyone works from Jira, it’s easy to keep of track of progress, updates, and milestones.

• Streamline reviews: Get the right eyes on the right work at the right time. No more mystery edits or approval black holes.

• Build stronger partnerships: Clear expectations and smooth reviews help agencies do their best work. That means fewer revisions, quicker turnarounds, and more time spent creation – not chasing feedback.

🤔 Next time you work with agency, consider bringing them into Jira.

From clearer briefs to faster reviews, Jira makes collaborating with external partners a whole lot easier. Try applying one or two of the tips above in your next agency-led campaign – you might be surprised by how much smoother things go.

Have questions or tips? Drop them in the comments! 🙏🏻