How to teach new employees to work with Confluence and Jira?

[Katerina Kovriga]

Hi guys!

Please, share your experience about Confluence/Jira and new employees.

When your company hires newbies without any experience in the Atlassian Ecosystem, how does the process look?

Who shows them how to work with the new software and use it effectively?

Do they use any external supplies (courses, books, etc.) to study Confluence/Jira?

Do your novice users train on the real company instance or any “sandboxes”?

And what is going on when you hire a new administrator (not a regular user!) without any Atlassian background?

What measures are usually taken to help him or her gain new skills in a short period of time and to not ruin your production instance and paralyze all the work?

What are, in your opinion, pros and cons of the existing approach? What do you want to change and why? Maybe, you recall your own experience, when you were a newbie to Confluence or Jira yourself – every bit of information is valuable for me.

Thanks!

[Hans Leemans]

Hi, that is not an easy to answer question. In very short simple statements:

First of all we created a policy 'how to document" where we outline the goals and what users can and can not do. We created exercise spaces / projects where users can do anything without hurting any operational processes. We created tasks for them to do and by doing that we teach these users how to use the user interface.

Then we also have workshops where the way of documenting is shared about setting up wiki like knowledge bases. We have specific workshops for space administrators, we have ambassadors and we created a space where use cases are shared. We have exercises for labels, setting up nice pages and how to link content. We have one responsable person that will keep track of all information to prevent that we loose our goal of one "single point of truth". 

We have a designed a Confluence and Jira infrastructure and we set out user roles and our deployment system. So, we can keep track of permissions. The design of the system includes the administrator permissions, space permissions and we use spaces that follow the company hierarchy (teams) but also spaces for horizontal topics. 

Naturally, being a large company we have a test environment where we test new add-ons before we shift these to production. 

And so, we are able to deploy the system to the planned thousands of users.

[Katerina Kovriga]

Thanks for your tips!