55x - Agile for Confluence Teams

[#1]

55!

The number of times I said 'agile' in a recent live learning about how Confluence can support Agile teams. (I had some fun and out a counter on screen, but didn't explain what it was for... Folks got really confused!).

It's easy to think agile projects don't need confluence - after all it's a knowledge base, and agile projects don't really document things. This is incorrect in a few places - agile projects do create and manage documentation and confluence isn't just a knowledge base, it's a collaboration platform.

There's many ways Confluence supports agile teams, but in this training we dig into three - templates, automations and integrations.

Templates

These help agile teams by speeding up content creation. Team members won't need to struggle with formatting, or create poorly formatted content, since the template does that for them.  All they need to do is open up some content, select the template they want and get creating.

Templates aren't just for pages either, whiteboards and databases also support them. This lets the team easily create sprint planning whiteboards or project trackers with just a few clicks. This time saved figuring out what to select, or choosing a process, can easily be spent on building value.

Teams can, and should!, make time to customize their templates. This does require a space admin, but taking time to ensure your templates are tailored to you teams needs only makes them more impactful as they'll do what you need. Check out this live learning for more info on templates.

Automations

Automations free up your team by making repeatable tasks disappear. There's almost no end to possibilities, but some examples that we covered include:

1. Starting a sprint when a specific page is created - imagine a new spring starting in Jira when you make a page titled 'sprint planning'. Or what about creating that sprint and the. Assigning it to tickets on the page?...
2. Auto archiving old info - this is a common use case as every team runs into stale content. Every few months Confluence just cleans itself up.  This keeps your agile team focused on the important info and removes clutter.
3. Auto labelling - labels are a highly under utilized feature that support search and multiple other features (like macros and automations). They're easily forgotten *cough* fix this Atlassian *cough*, but automations can be setup to add them to pages based on a trigger (like an issue being attached).

Integrations

This was another area we dug into - especially with Jira. This is an easy win as many teams that use confluence also use Jira - especially agile teams. Confluence offers a number of native connections to Jira, including:

1. Displaying tickets in Confluence pages - useful for things like retrospectives and planning, this allows you to include links, or entirely embed tickets, on your pages. This keeps you in one system (Confluence) - reducing the need to click around - making it much easier to stay focused.
2. Showing tickets in whiteboards - tickets can be represented in whiteboards. Ever better you can edit some attributes, like assignee, by clicking and dragging. Imagine a sprint planning session where you just move tickets into someones name and they're assigned.

FAQ

The team had a lot of great questions about using Confluence to support Agile teams, including:

1. Does Kanban (an agile methodology) use Sprints?
   1. No - Kanban instead uses a board to focus the team on a few priorities at any one time. This allows them to knock out small numbers of tasks vs. spreading out over many.
   2. Scrum is the agile methodology that uses Sprints.
   3. Want to learn more about Project Management? check out this Udemy course
2. What is ScrumBan?
   1. A way to combine Scrum with Kanban - it is one of the many variations of Agile you may run into.
3. What is Jayquill???
   1. The correct way to pronounce "JQL"
4. Can I resize multiple whiteboard objects at the same time?
   1. no... :(
5. How can I access the "Confluence content" links on a Jira ticket via automation?
   1. I haven't figured this one out yet- but will keep looking!
6. Why can I only make 3 whiteboards?
   1. You're likely on the free plan, which only allows 3 active whiteboards per user.
7. How can I share my templates across spaces?
   1. This is a common challenge, that has a few possible solutions...
      1. Create a Global template (requires an Org admin...). This will allow the template to exist in all spaces.
      2. Use the "space" dropdown to change spaces when searching for templates - you just need to know which space the one you want lives in.

There's a ton more ways Confluence supports agile - but I'm curious how you use this tool, and what questions you have. Share below!

Also icymi here's the session: