At Atlassian Team Europe in Barcelona, Nicholas Dring shared how Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia uses Jira Service Management and Microsoft Teams to coordinate requests across a large scientific research institution.
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) has more than 2,000 employees working across research centers in Italy and other locations. Its Jira Service Management setup brings together requests for websites, web applications, internal printing, photography, video production, and event support.
Nicholas explained how Microsoft 365 for Jira helps keep Microsoft Teams communication connected with Jira work items. The objective is simple: make collaboration easier to follow without asking every employee to abandon the tools they already use.
Customer challenge: Keeping cross-department work visible
Many requests at a research institution involve more than one department. An event may require outreach support, printed material, website updates, photography, and video production. Each group contributes a different part of the work.
Jira Service Management provides a structured place to submit and track these requests. However, much of the conversation surrounding them still happens through email or Microsoft Teams.
Nicholas pointed out that email often becomes a one-to-one conversation. Microsoft Teams can create the same problem when a discussion moves into a private chat. Decisions are made, requirements change, and useful details are exchanged, but other people working on the request may not see that context.
The result is a familiar administrative puzzle: Jira shows the work item, while the conversation explaining it lives somewhere else.
The implemented workflow: Connecting Teams conversations with Jira work
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia uses Jira Service Management as the central place for managing requests across its service teams. Employees can submit requests to the appropriate area, while Jira provides the workflow, ownership, status, and history.
Using Microsoft 365 for Jira, participating teams can start a Microsoft Teams conversation from a Jira work item. The discussion remains associated with the work instead of becoming another isolated chat.
This gives people a familiar place to communicate while helping Jira users retain the context behind the request.
When work crosses departmental boundaries or moves to another person, the next participant has a better chance of understanding what has already been discussed.
The outcome Nicholas observed
The main outcome Nicholas described was greater transparency. Employees can see what is happening with their requests, and service teams have a shared place to coordinate the work.
Connected Teams conversations also make handovers easier. When communication remains associated with the Jira work item, the next person does not have to search for a separate email thread or ask colleagues to retell the story.
These benefits do not come from one feature alone. They reflect IIT’s broader use of Jira, Microsoft Teams, organizational data integrations, and automation. Together, these tools reduce repetitive updates and help service teams spend more time working on requests.
Based on practical experience, Nicholas estimated that the setup saves an IIT team several working days each year.
Nicholas also described time savings from bringing requests, communication, and Jira automation into a more consistent process. Fewer manual updates and less searching for context can add up quickly in an organization of this size.
The goal is not to move every conversation into Jira. It is to keep the conversations that affect a requirement, decision, or next action connected with the work they concern. Long live context.
What Jira admins can take from this
Nick's experience suggests starting with the process rather than the integration. Identify where requests are submitted, where the related conversations happen, and where information is most likely to become disconnected. A few practical considerations are:
- Start with one cross-department workflow where missing context regularly causes repeated questions or difficult handovers.
- Decide which Teams conversations should be connected to Jira and which should remain in Teams.
- Check how Jira permissions, work item security, and Teams membership affect who can see connected information.
- Enable only the capabilities that have a clear use case and organizational approval.
Research institutions may also have specific requirements for confidentiality, retention, and access control. Connecting Microsoft Teams with Jira does not replace those policies. The organization still needs to determine what information may be shared, who may access it, and which platform acts as the official record. This becomes even more relevant as AI & Rovo enter these workflows: more context is not automatically better context, and access to information does not necessarily make it relevant.
The most useful lesson from this implementation is pleasantly uncomplicated: Jira can provide the structure, Teams can support the conversation, and the integration can connect the right context to the right work, without creating yet another place for people, or AI, to search.
Full disclosure: I'm Britta, and I work at yasoon, the company behind Microsoft 365 for Jira. I had the pleasure of interviewing our customer Nicholas Dring. The opinions he shared are his own and do not represent or imply endorsement by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.
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