Boosting your Marketing team productivity with Jira & Confluence. Step 1: Adoption.

[#1]

There is one team at every company that is noisy, messy, and usually with completely different work processes from all others. Yes, the Marketing team.

By its means, quite often, the Marketing team is the hardest one to transition to new types of working methodology because of the essence of its work. Deadlines, latest news, spontaneous updates are just a few drops in the ocean of events which may occur during a 2-week Sprint.

How Botron's marketing team transitioned to Scrum and Agile?

Hard.

First, we were introduced to the methodology and provided with enough freedom and information to find a way and stick to it. Welcome to our list of initial problems:

1. How to have enough visibility in a fast-changing environment like the Atlassian Ecosystem?

2. How to plan and build your core initiatives for a 2-week track?

3. How to be productive and get the most of your Jira & Confluence environments?

Let's say that we spent some time figuring things out - 1 and 2-week Sprints, moving some major tasks through the Sprints, splitting the big tasks to finish the planned part within the Sprint. It took almost a year to get things up and running in a way that is not making us unhappy or counterproductive. Diving into some of our pillars of existence:

Learn from the best

Stop trying to invent the light bulb, read and learn, then observe and adapt. We spent time asking our colleagues, people who we are working with, and even lectors at one of the Atlassian Summits. The first change was born: plan, prioritize, get less load for the Sprint to have the possibility to hop into an unexpected task (like social posting, quick news publishing, or organizing a present for your colleague's newborn). Sounds obvious but we still had some situations like "it's not Scrum when you add things in the middle of a Sprint without warning." Sorry, not sorry.

Get the maximum from your tools

In the beginning, the Marketing team had one Jira project to track and visualize its progress and one Confluence space to gather all knowledge. After a whole year of countless articles, information, events, and drafts, we were drowning in a sea of words, and it was almost impossible to find anything in our Marketing Confluence. The second change arose: separate all initiatives, create an archive, and keep them in good order. It was a one-week effort to arrange our new spaces, and we transitioned from one main Marketing Space to 9 new spaces with their specific purpose, information, and needs. Once you organize your closet correctly, and you'll be forever happy. 

Jira is not only for the Dev Teams

It was a big mistake that we thought of Jira more like a useful dev tool, and completely not relative to marketing. At first, we were adding our more significant tasks like campaigns, newsletters, events, etc., without looking more deeply into the details. Like our sample task "Atlassian Summit blog post" - great, perfect, nothing more to add, we'll remember all the things that were discussed around this topic.

"Ha-Ha". 

Of course, we won't remember all the things discussed before the event. And writing the details on our notebooks and Notes was only making things worse. Jira is about details, visibility, and responsibility. Breaking your tasks to their smaller pieces and moving one step after another is bringing more focus, much more productivity, and eliminates the need to ask one another what is happening and who is working on what. Sure, there are times when you feel less creative, and you need to jump on something different, but when your work steps are carefully and precisely defined, it's an easy flip. 

I should mention that at the beginning, our team was utterly unfamiliar with the Atlassian Stack and its capabilities, so we evolved bit by bit with a lot of stupid jokes behind our backs  

Stay tuned for Step 2!

* thanks to the awesome Simon's Cat for helping me illustrate my article 💙

[Poorvi Jhawar]

@Teodora V _Fun Inc_ 

I have a very similar one about my experience (it is still in final draft) - and you beat me to it :P 

It's been 4 months since I have deep dived in the Atlassian ecosystem and it has bee a ride. I'm even more happy to know that I'm not alone in the way I feel - It is super relatable :)

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

@Poorvi Jhawar 

Spending time here in the Community will boost your skills much faster, I'm sure of that :)

But it's challenging to change from Zero to Jira hehe.

[Bill Cushard]

Ha! Yes, @Teodora V _Fun Inc_ ... It's not scrum if you add things to the sprint, mid-sprint. Once we got on a role running scrum on our marketing team, we found pleasure in saying to me who had a request, "Our current sprint is underway, we'll put that in the backlog and plan for it in the next one." OR "OK. Our sprint is locked down. How important is this? What would you like us to swap your task out for." 

That feels good. 

All marketing teams should read this post. 

[Marketing Department]

I run marketing teams and have for years.  I don't think changing to Agile, and Scrum is the issue.  Knowing how marketing works and how to run it and adapt is the issue. So far, I haven't read anything by anyone who actually seems to have solved the issue. I think I will have to figure this out because the help desk is not offering any assistance.

Thanks, and good luck, guys.  I will come back and post what I learn.  Wish me luck.

[Kelly Drozd]

@Teodora V _Fun Inc_ Great article. Would you be open to discussing your experience? Before joining Atlassian, I lead agile transformation efforts at a large marketing organization and scaled Jira and Confluence. 

@Daphne Rothlisberger  I would love to hear about what you have learned in the last few months!

My email is kdrozd@atlassian.com, I'd love to hear from you!  

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Thank you, @Kelly Drozd! Would love to! 

[Ellie Behling]

Hi @Teodora V _Fun Inc_ 

Great piece. I'm working on transferring our marketing projects to Jira (and it will be a career first for me!). I notice it's hard to come by truly useful information on this topic. So thank you for writing this!

Just wondering if step 2 of your series ever came out? I couldn't seem to find in your archive.

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Thank you, @Ellie Behling!

I'm more than happy my article is helping you! Honestly, Step 2 stayed "in the making" mainly because my company was acquired, and I changed teams after. So it was a bit messy.

But I can give you some articles that may be of help! My new team is very much into the struggle, and we are experimenting and changing perspectives the entire time.

• Here you can read about our Jira "adoption" experience as a new team.
• This article is mainly focused on the Hybrid approach - how to use Agile, but without overkilling your process.
• And here are some bits and pieces on my previous team set up :)

If you need advice or a helping hand, you can always drop me a message on LinkedIn or via email 💙

I am always up to a challenge when it comes to Jira and Business teams!

[Ellie Behling]

@Teodora V _Fun Inc_ Wow, thank you so much for sharing these links and your thoughtful post!

I see myself going all-in on the Jira for business teams topic as well :) It's fascinating to me.

I'm glad to have you as a resource. I will check these out and keep you posted. Have an awesome weekend!

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

It's a pleasure, @Ellie Behling :)

Have an amazing weekend as well!