Tutorial: A-Z guide to project management using Confluence

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Project management is a battlefield against deadlines, communication gaps, and ever-shifting priorities. It’s difficult to keep track of all these moving parts, especially where teams juggle individual projects while simultaneously aligning them with organizational objectives.

With a robust collaboration platform like Confluence, you can organize projects and teams all in one place, while enjoying these capabilities:

• Chart a clear path: Map out project plans and roadmaps with shared goals & strategic resource allocation. It’s a single source of truth for stakeholder alignment and ongoing communication, especially if scope creeps arise.  

• Collaborate on project delivery across platforms: Thanks to its extensive integration capabilities, you can connect Confluence and Jira for simple task management. Plus, you can build various project dashboards and reports right in Confluence based on Jira data.

• Bridge the communication divide: Foster seamless collaboration across diverse teams and departments, even if they are external users. Confluence facilitates information sharing, eliminates silos, and keeps everyone up-to-date with crucial updates, enabling proactive decision-making.

• Build a knowledge vault: Confluence centralizes project insights, best practices, and learnings. This readily accessible knowledge base empowers future endeavors, enabling continuous improvement across teams.

In this article, you’ll learn how to implement Confluence for managing complex projects.

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Contents:

1. Setting up a collaborative environment in Confluence
   • Structure spaces by project teams or clients
   • Build a project hub with page properties macro
   • Ensure consistent project info by using templates
   • Advanced solution: Confluence databases
2. Create project plans and track deliverables
   • Embed external content
   • Visualize tasks through Confluence roadmaps
   • Project deliverables tracking and Jira integration
3. Project communication with internal and external stakeholders
   • Share instant project updates or scheduled reports
   • Collaborate with external stakeholders
     • Single-space guests
     • Public links

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1. Setting up a collaborative environment in Confluence

Think of Confluence as your project brain. It connects different workspaces to facilitate team collaboration, where you capture ideas, scope out project requirements, specify team roles and responsibilities, as well as report on delivery timelines. 

In this section, we’ll show you practical tips for organizing your Confluence site to accommodate various project requirements.

🏗 Structure spaces by project teams or clients

Ensuring a consistent project structure within your organization's Confluence instance is crucial. Not only does it improve user navigation and reduce confusion when switching between projects, but it also encourages efficient workflows and facilitates the adoption of Confluence as a central information hub. 

One of the common approaches is to have dedicated team spaces, often by functional departments like HR, Marketing, or Operations. But when you have multiple teams working on the same project, you’ll want to structure projects at the space level. 

Confluence space templates provide a great starting point with different categories and ready-built pages.

Tip: If you use Confluence to accompany Jira, simply link your project to the corresponding space

This allows teams to access project documentation directly and get the information they need to get work done, without spending time searching through the whole Confluence site. 

You can even create a new Confluence page directly from Jira. This is extremely useful to reduce context switching, for instance, to jot down a quick meeting note while running a project kick-off discussion. 

We recommend you determine your site structure at first because it would save you tons of time to manage projects at a portfolio level. Continue reading to learn more.

🚥 Build a project hub with page properties macro

As your project pages (or spaces) grow, it will get harder for your users to navigate and find relevant content. Imagine a new team member going through their onboarding process. They need to understand not only standard practices and how-tos; but also historical data of the project that they’ll be working on.

This is why you’ll need a directory page where you can get an overview of all projects.

In this example, we have a Project Team’s space served as a knowledge base. Within this space, there’s a project directory that contains links and information about the team’s projects from other spaces. And the project details (columns) will be automatically updated based on the actual value of the original project page. That’s the power of the Page Properties Report macro.

Here are 2 simple steps to set this up:

• Step 1: When you document a new project plan, add the Page Properties macro to summarize the information about the project. Then add a page label, i.e. project-overview 
  
  
  
  
• Step 2: On the directory page, create the Page Properties Report macro - this will aggregate the page summary that you’ve defined on the individual project page. Make sure to filter the list by label (project-overview)
  
  

By default, it will display all the fields available through the page properties, but you can also determine which one to show. And that’s it!

🗂 Ensure consistent project info by using templates

To take full advantage of this awesome feature, you need to ensure the page properties are added to every project plan document. 

Don’t worry, there’s a simple method to implement this, and even new team members can easily follow.

You must be already familiar with Confluence page template. Did you know you can select a custom template with a click of a button? Simply add the Create from template macro, every new project page will be added to the directory with consistent information. 

It only requires a one-time setup: 

• Step 1: Create a custom project plan template with the Page Properties macro - you can flexibly edit the necessary details for different projects. You’d need space administrative permission to create or edit templates.

• Step 2: On respective project spaces, add the Create from Template macro and select the project template you’ve just created.

This means whenever your team kicks off a new project, they only have to click this button and start filling out the project details. 

Here’s how it looks:

🧮 Advanced solution: Confluence databases

Currently in beta, Confluence databases offer a more convenient way to store and organize structured data. Instead of having to maintain the Page Properties macro content, with this new feature, you can directly add page entries and associated information. It’s possible to in-line edit or bulk update the fields as well:

2. Create project plans and track deliverables

Now that we’ve covered the overall project management setup guide in Confluence. Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of each project plan.

Besides the high-level Page Properties macro, there are a number of useful page elements that will help you format an engaging and actionable project plan.

🧩 Embed external content

Confluence is a well-oiled machine where information flows effortlessly between platforms. This means your teams can carry out work using their preferred software (e.g. Google Docs for writing long-form content or Figma for creating design specs). It’s easy to share and edit content from external tools right from your Confluence page, thanks to its smart links.

Whether you need to present a design file or showcase a slideshow, get everything on the Confluence page to keep all your deliverables in one place.

🗺 Visualize tasks through Confluence roadmaps

Aside from the traceability, another benefit of using Confluence to share and coordinate your project execution is that you can visualize everything on a roadmap.

With the Roadmap Planner macro, you can create a simple timeline view of all your work. Each bar represents a deliverable, and you can link it to the corresponding Confluence page.

🚀 Project deliverables tracking and Jira integration

Every seasoned Atlassian user will recommend using Confluence and Jira together to scope project requirements and track deliverables.

Yes, you can treat Confluence as a lightweight project management tool using the task-tracking function. Use the Action item (to-do) macro to assign tasks.

The best part is that the assignee will be able to track their assignments via the Tasks menu, which is accessible from the Confluence homepage.

For more complex project environments, it’s ideal to track work in Jira, while Confluence is mainly used for scoping requirements and reporting. 

You’ll notice the various Jira macros available within Confluence.

Not only for project planning, you can also build a full-fledged project dashboard using Jira data to keep your finger on the project pulse. And another handy Jira integration feature is the ability to create new issues from Confluence in-line text.

Furthermore, reviewing sprint work on Jira is effortless with Confluence’s retrospective template. Utilize it to capture learnings, identify areas for improvement, and adapt your future strategies. 

Don’t forget, these retrospective pages can be organized in a “collection” for future reference, using the page properties report macro as we’ve introduced earlier. 

3. Project communication with internal and external stakeholders

Finally, we’ll see how easy it is to foster transparency and asynchronous communication with all project stakeholders.

📩 Share instant project updates or scheduled reports

Besides @mention users in the comments, you can engage with relevant stakeholders simply by inviting them to watch the page.

This is useful for instant status updates without having to manually inform each user. It’s even possible to schedule publishing to maintain consistent project page updates.

For trivial changes, however, you can choose to update without notifying watchers. 

📟 Collaborate with external stakeholders

Want to brainstorm with your agency partners, share project updates with investors, or collect feedback from beta testers? Collaborating with external clients just got a whole lot smoother with Confluence with these new features.

Single-space guests

It’s now possible to invite external collaborators to your Confluence site. Simply configure guest access with appropriate view or edit permissions. That way, everyone can collaborate on a specific space, and you don’t have to worry about complicated permission settings for other internal spaces.

Public links

This sharing option lets you share the page even without a Confluence account. It’s useful for public-facing documents like customer research invitations, product announcements, or a marketing newsletter.

Access this feature from the Share dialog, toggle on the "public link" option, and voilà! A unique URL is generated, ready to be shared with anyone. 

Supercharging your project arsenal with Confluence! 

Confluence isn't just software; it fosters a collaborative mindset. With Confluence, your team is encouraged to share knowledge and exchange ideas in real time, making project management a breeze. 

These are just native Confluence features, and you can further enhance the platform with third-party apps to cater to your specific needs. But that’s a topic for another time.

Comment below: How are you implementing Confluence for managing projects?  🤩

[Patricia Modispacher _appanvil_]

Thank you very much for this excellent and detailed article, @Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc ! Confluence alone is brilliant, but in our company we have Mantra. And I have to admit: With this Confluence intranet, any project management is easier because you can interact better and faster with each other. 🙌 Especially if you also want to include event planning and overviews in projects, this offers a huge advantage! 🚀