Confluence for high level communication?

[Nathan Davis]

Issue: We have a company consisting of a few different software divisions, each independently run and not all using the same tool set for tracking issues aka JIRA, or using their own instances of JIRA without a coordinated definition for an EPIC. 

Upper level management wants to have a super high level view of the projects in an ideation phase that division is working on. These are projects where we are thinking of implementing and want to see that division A and division B are both thinking about the same problem, maybe they should talk about what they know, learning, and possible solutions. We probably only need to track:

• Quick summary
• Point of Contact
• division thinking of idea
• Area (Product change, Technical / Architectural change, Operations) 
• maybe a longer description, but this is optional. Often time simply knowing the summary is enough info

What we are simply looking for is Group A is working on implementing: 

1. Caching tier 
2. Photo Storage 
3. New iOS app for XXXX
4. Deployment tooling for pushing changes to PROD

These are a few quick examples. How can we do this effectively with Confluence?

• I though about creating a template page for this info, which works, but requires training, super minimal, but it exist.
•  I also found https://lab.spectrumgroupe.fr/confluence/display/SBD/Ideation+user+guide+-+V1.X which seems like it could also work, but gives us a bit more info then we may really need.

Are there any other plugins out there to investigate? Am I missing something basic with Confluence, templates, plugins ect?

Casey Daniell

[Bhushan Nagaraj]

Hi Nathan/Casey,

Two features that you might find helpful.

Roadmap Planner macro to display the high level projects on a timeline.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Roadmap+Planner+Macro

Each of the items on the timeline, can be mapped to a Confluence page with further information that you have listed above such as point of contact, area, etc. You might want to organize the pages into different areas such as Product Chance, Technical/Architectural Chance, etc.

For each of the pages, you can use Confluence Blueprints to define a page template that teams can just fill in. 

For more information on Blueprints, refer to https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Blueprints

So your Confluence space may look something like this.

Space Program Management

• Page: Program Roadmap (Roadmap linked to different child pages like Project X, Project A, below)
• Page: Product Changes
  • Child page: Project X
  • Child Page: Project Y
• Page: Technical Changes
  • Child Page: Project A
• Page: Architectural Changes
  • Child Page: Project B