Communicate goals across Atlassian products
10 min
Beginner
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Share goals and projects with your organization
- Use Atlassian best practices to communicate goals to your organization
How can you share goals with your organization?
You can add individuals and teams to a project as contributors and followers.
Contributors are people who will work on the project in some way.
Followers are stakeholders, dependent teams, or other interested people who want updates on the project. You can also add followers to goals.
Atlassian automatically adds contributors as followers to the project. The project also appears on their profile under Projects and goals.
To add followers to a project or goal:
- Open any project or goal. In the right panel, next to Followers, select +.
- Search for and select individuals or teams.
- Select Share.
To add contributors to a project:
- Open any project. In the right panel, next to Contributors, select +.
- Search for and select individuals or teams. You can also search for a team and select only some of its members.
If you want to limit who can see a project, you can make it private. This restricts who can engage with the project.
To learn more about private projects, see Atlassian Documentation.
How can you keep followers up-to-date?
You should provide consistent updates on your goals. Updates are a critical part of goals in Atlassian. They should be concise, clear, and engaging for followers. There’s a 280-character limit for updates to support this. You can choose one of the templates to get you started, or use your own format.
👇There are a variety of templates available for updates.
Updates can include smart links that provide additional context on related documents and work. Smart links show a preview of embedded content from Confluence, Jira, Trello, Figma, Mural, Google Docs, Loom, and many other tools. This makes it easy to reference content without having to summarize it.
👇This is a smart link to a goal in a Jira work item.
You can post updates from Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, if these products are integrated with your Atlassian site.
To learn how to post updates from other places, see documentation on Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Project owners get a weekly reminder to update their projects, while goal owners get a monthly reminder to update their goals. Similarly, project followers get weekly updates, while goal followers get monthly updates.
Project or goal owners won’t get automatic reminders for paused projects or goals.
Share what you know with learnings, risks, and decisions
You can add learnings to goals, in addition to updates. Learnings aren't trying to capture your team’s progress toward a goal. Instead, they highlight interesting information you’ve learned while pursuing your goal. Other teams can benefit from the learnings you share, especially if they’re working on a similar or dependent goal.
👇 Anyone who can view a goal can see learnings in the Learnings tab.
You can also add risks to goals to document any potential challenges in executing your goal.
👇 Risks appear in the Risks tab.
And you can add decisions to goals to document any important changes in direction.
👇 Decisions appear in the Decisions tab.
Update statuses for your goals
In addition to updates and learnings, goals have statuses that quickly indicate how your team is progressing toward your goal. The statuses are:
- Off track
- At risk
- On track
- Pending
- Paused
- Completed
If you change the status for a goal, you should explain why in your next update.
If you aren’t going to continue pursuing a goal or project, you can archive it. This stops reminders and removes content from search, though users can still navigate to it.
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Track and support goals across Atlassian products
- Track your progress toward goals with topics and views
- Save views to surface your work
- Analyze your goals and projects further
- Export data to CSV for further analysis