How can Atlassian teams be organized?

[Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__]

I'd like to discuss "how can teams who are working on Atlassian business be organized". I want to share how our team is organized so we can start with something. So...

Our team is part or the MoroSystems company which is Atlassian Platinum Partner for Czechia and Slovakia. The size of the Atlassian team is about 1/10 of the entire company. We are working in multiple areas and we have a lot of roles and responsibilities in our team. The areas we serve are:

• Consultations
  • Architecture of solutions based on the Atlassian applications in areas like IT, Telco, manufacturing industry, banking...
• Customizations
  • Until now we provided customization of Atlassian Server tools (mostly Jira and Confluence) using Atlassian SDK (Java) and React.js on frontend part. We still do it but we know the customer interest will decline.
• Service and systems support
  • We provide support for our solutions (customizations, consultations or only Atlassian products management).
• Licences
  • We provide licences for Atlassian tools and advices for customers so they have the ideal setup of licences for customer's business in the end.
• Products and assets
  • We have few Apps on Marketplace (we can say that one of them, Easymind, is successfull app). We also provide trainings for our customers.

Ok, so that's what we do. And now something about how we organize the whole team. We are still working on it (for almost a year) but we have following roles in the team so far:

• business leader - responsibility is to have Atlassian business under control, to have required profit margin, to have plan of the projects and to sell required amount of licences to fulfill Atlassian Platinum plan.
• competency leader - responsibility is to drive strategic development of the team, to take care of doing things correctly and to have enough certifications in the team to fulfill Atlassian Platinum plan.
• solution architects/consultants - provide advices and architecture for customer solutions.
• developers - work on products and customizations of Atlassian tools for our customer.
• sales and licences support - provides support for customers who need licences or who need a consultation or customization.

In sum, there are 15 people organizing around our Atlassian business. It is not so much but even for this amount of people we needed to create more structures in the team. We need to have:

• Strategy team which consists of the business and competency leader
• Core team which consists of the all the people who are responsible for areas above
  • we have some people who are helping us on Atlassian projects only temporarily and we do not force them to be the part of the Core team

You can't see anything about Marketing in my list of roles or responsobilities. We simply do not have it (yet). So in 2020 we tried to do marketing in the team of mostly "Tech" people. We have published 23 blog posts and held 6 webinars (I'm really proud of our team). We also prepared Whitepaper with "Atlassian Cloud Myths" theme.

We were also surprised by information about "Server end" (like most of the people). Few of us were dissapointed but we put facts together and decided to take this situation as an opportunity to "refresh" our customer business and the way we do the things. We want to rather support our customers than to complain about something what is just the fact.

The world is changing. So we know we need a team vision (which is more static) and strategy to fulfill it. We are using OKR to manage our strategic tasks. We can react quite fast when anything change using this system. To be honest, we are on the beginning, because using of the OKR is not as simple as reading about it :).

I hope that 2021 will be a great year for most of the Atlassian partners and for you all. And I, personaly, wish you all the best. We must be here for our customers and we are responsible to provide inovative solutions to help them to do theirs business clearly and efficiently.

That's all from me and I'd really  like to hear your opinion or your own experience. How do you organize in teams which are working on Atlassian business?

[Taranjeet Singh]

Great informative article, thanks for sharing @Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__ !

[Capi [resolution]]

Really interesting @Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__ !

There are a few points where I can make a connection to the time when I was working at a solution partner. I feel like creating a shared vision when you are working with customer projects is often hard, because creating value for the customer doesn't immediately translate in creating value (and not just revenue) for the org.

I'm sure some of your OKRs are based around that, it'd be interesting to learn more.

And yes, working based on OKRs is a big challenge. Particularly in an office-less situation, having that common understanding can be a struggle!

[Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__]

Thank you for your comment @Capi [resolution] . My point of view when talking about vision... I'm quite sure that vision can't be only organization centric. It must have additional value and I think helping customers is a great one. So we can have vision which

1. helps us to grow (knowledge)
2. prepares us to give more value to customers (help)

And the result of it is that revenue grows too. It is an idealistic view, but I'm kind of idealistic person :D.

[Capi [resolution]]

I think your view works very well @Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__ !

[Dave Liao]

@Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__ - thanks for giving the community insight into your operations! Even for 15 devoted people, it's a lot of work - and I see that you have help from other parts of your business, too!

• How are you managing your OKRs? Just curious...
• How does your team schedule time to get their needed certifications so MoroSystems stays a Platinum Partner? It's such a challenge for all industries. 😄

[Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__]

Hi @Dave Liao thank you for your comment :)...

1. OKRs: we still use Jira Data Center so we are using Structure to display and manage our objectives and key results
2. Platinum: yeah, it is very challenging. We have a big advantage that Czech republic is in zone B, so it is enough for us to have 8 certified individuals
   1. we have our certifications and expiration dates stored in Insight
   2. 3 months before expiration notification is triggered so we can start work on badge to extend certification

[Nick Haller]

Thanks for sharing!