How Confluence Templates Change the Way You Think
Do you know there are more than 120 page templates in Confluence?
From simple to-do lists to more complex project reports and content strategies, Confluence got you covered, providing a carefully crafted library of building blocks.
When I started using Confluence as my go-to content hub, I built each page from scratch. Because I’m too smart to use templates, you know. I used it for project tracking, content writing, team management, task reports, status reports, and even sharing recipes and photos from recent vacations.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn? Get out of here! Pour everything in Confluence like autumn rain.
As you may suggest, that didn’t turn out quite nicely. I was buried in pages with questionable efficacy, and my team was not pleased about it.
We encountered the beginning of a time-consuming issue: many poorly organized spaces, information got harder to find instead of the opposite, and people were asking more questions in Slack than searching in Confluence.
Not. Good.
Luckily, we are the kind of team that never lose time arguing and discussing what went wrong. If there are bad results and visible problems, we jump straight into fixing them.
One of the primary issues was time. Calculating the time lost by each team member while searching for content or figuring out the beginning of a new page showed us red light. That quickly points us to the question:
Why are we not using the templates already built and approved by professionals in multiple areas?
Answer hides in the question.
Sprint Planning Meeting
The first template we adopted almost immediately. Built by Jira but used by many to keep track of their Sprint planning and don’t waste time figuring out the meeting agenda.
Template features we love most:
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Sprint Planning Checklist: what needs to be prepared before the meeting and what we should revisit after.
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Sprint Team Members: who participated in the meeting and who are doomed to watch a Zoom recording
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Agenda: Meeting without agenda is a curse.
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Action items and capacity planning: each team member is responsible for calculating their capacity and figuring out the amount of work they can handle in the upcoming Sprint.
Quarterly Check In
Something new to our team that already has a healthy and positive impact. Using the Confluence template and following the best practices for reflection and alignment on goals, our teams better understood their core priorities and work balance.
The purpose of our Q-Meetings is to continually realign our activities with our priorities and make sure we are happy doing it.
Template features we love most:
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Reflections
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Update goals and priorities
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Align on feedback
Having this Confluence template helped us go straight to the discussion instead of spending time building it up. As always, we spiced it up with a few additional reports to visualize progress and/or count tasks assigned to a single team member.
Content Strategy
9 months into 2022, and I still can’t say it better. Goal setting is a love and hate relationship, but sometimes you switch the word from “goal” to “desire,” and it works out!
And yes, it’s the real issue count. We just love getting sh#t done.
You saw only three examples of how implementing Confluence templates might reduce your time and effort in getting a project started. With the constantly expanding library of handy templates, you will achieve zero downtime when clicking the Create button.
As the saying goes: There’s a Confluence template for that.
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Teodora _Old Street Solutions_Tempo_
About this author
Marketing Manager of Custom Charts for Jira
Old Street Solutions
Sofia, Bulgaria
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