Using Atlassian for Marketing & Communication general requests and projects

[Clint Young]

Background - 

I am the Senior Project Manager for the Strategic Communications team at a University. I'm evaluating a PM system to recommend to my VP for us to start implementing. Our team consists of graphic designers (print and web), web developers, video, photo, news, and magazine.

Atlassian vs. other marketing specific solutions -

Atlassian - Gold standard for Project Management
Marketing Specific Solutions - Better at general marketing requests that are not full blown projects per say.

The Atlassian Plan - 

We would use Service Desk for our general marketing requests. We would use Jira Core or Software depending on how Agile we wanted to be on a project. We would use Confluence for documentation, meeting notes, team calendars, etc.

Soliciting lessons learned - 

Has anyone in the community gone through a similar experience?
What has worked or not worked for your Marketing and Communications specific teams?
Have you been successful using Atlassian with Digital Asset Management Systems?
How have you overcome the "Jira is for IT and/or software developers" mentality?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

[Meg Holbrook]

@Kesha Thill For the Win!

I love hearing about how Atlassians work ^_^

[Kesha Thill]

@Clint Young haha sure! after it sinks in, happy to answer more questions you may have! 

In regards to a DAM system, in short we don't. We actually store a lot of our files in Confluence by dedicating a space or just a page to certain assets, or using the file list template to store decks, images, etc. Sometimes we'll use dropbox when we have a large number of assets and then just paste the dropbox link on the project page it's associated with. It's not the most perfect answer, but it's been working for us so far! 

[Clint Young]

@Meg Holbrook - Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I agree with Kesha, definitely great insights.

[Clint Young]

@Kesha Thill

 

This is fantastic!!!! I'll have to read this a couple more times to let it all sink in. 

Another question if I may - Do you use a Digital Asset Management system and does it integrate with Jira and Confluence? I know Confluence can do a little asset management with commenting on versions, but I was just curious if you use something more robust.

[Kesha Thill]

I echo all the above! @Meg Holbrook has all the great insights! 

[Kesha Thill]

Hi @Clint Young! 

I'm on the Confluence marketing team so I figured I could shed some light on the marketing use case and provide an "inside look at Atlassian" given that we use our products here :) Prepare yourself, this will be long!

I'll start with what we use Confluence for, which is just about everything - I'm in it all day, as is the rest of our marketing team (and whole company). We use it to plan our marketing initiatives for the year, map out quarterly objectives, draft all copy for any type of asset we are creating (think blog, website copy, ebooks, etc.), put together project and campaign plans (and all the content for each project), build messaging houses, write press releases, meeting notes - anything that requires content we do it in Confluence. I also work very closely with our design team, and whenever they mockup a design asset for us, they just add it to the page where I'm drafting copy so we can keep everything together. Plus, I can add feedback on the mockup through inline comments. In most meetings, we end up presenting a Confluence page that we can just add notes to throughout, instead of a deck or anything else. (This community thread may be helpful too)

The benefit for us is that it's incredibly easy to bring in other teams that we are working with to provide feedback on copy or design (through inline comments and page comments), and we can easily iterate on things as a team on one page instead sending files back in forth via email. And because we keep our pages open (within the company) and not locked down with permissions, we save a ton of time and prevent a lot of questions since people have access to the information already.

We use Jira Service Desk to work in a more streamlined way with our marketing counterparts like design, web team, video team, etc. Every functional team has their own service desk and when we need their support in creating an asset or running an experiment, we submit a ticket and it will get assigned to a member of the team. On that ticket we provide all the information needed for the asset, and links to confluence pages that have the project plan or copy for a webpage, whatever it may be so the designer or videographer has the context and details they need. Any questions get commented on the ticket and we go from there! Depending on what you're using Jira Service Desk for, you can customize the fields to your liking! This thread should also give you ideas.

Our marketing team also uses either Jira or Trello (depending on preference) for planning our weekly sprints - our activities for the week. We'll frequently paste Jira tickets on Confluence pages as well to give an update on the status of a task/project. We also incorporate the tickets of our design team or web teams that work with us on our team's Jira board. The benefits here are that 1) our team's to-dos are all in one place and 2) I can see what different team members are working on and what their workload is, which is especially handy if I need support from someone.

Biggest benefit = all these products integrate with each other so updates get reflected across the board and it's easy to link from one product to another. And if you find that you use a lot of other software, we have a Marketplace with tons of apps that integrate with all of our products, which can hopefully help any resistance in switching/adding products.

I hope that helps a bit and if you have any questions, happy to chat! 

[Meg Holbrook]

Hey Clint, 

I don't want to speak for teams who may have used JSD for your specific business use case, but here are the benefits I can see from experiences implementing across non-IT teams:

- Requests/Issues don't live in a mailbox anymore

This was the biggest win for our non-IT teams (everyone, really). There were so many issues that were being committed to and we were manually cataloging emails, calendar notices, documents, etc. There was no 'single source of truth' when it came to current issues and projects. 

Ever since we moved some of our non-technical teams to JSD, they saw huge increases in productivity and focus. Everything is laid out in the ticket and nothing is lost. 

- Visibility of status, next steps, work done, who owns the item, etc

For my teams, the ability to collaborate was the missing link in our use of email boxes, endless spreadsheets, and meetings. Whenever we needed to know what the other person was working on, we could take a look in the ticket. 

- Ability for outside users to easily raise issues (another layer of visibility)

The ability to have users outside the team raise issues and requests was crucial to our project's adoption and success. If I were to onboard our Marketing team tomorrow, one of the biggest wins would be that our sales team could just send an email or go to the portal and we'd instantly have a record and a game plan. 

- Reporting

I find that reporting through JSD is fantastic and affords us the ability to track trending labels and reassign resources as needed. Being able to provide valuable key performance indicator metrics such as time it takes to complete requests, volume of requests, and what types of requests are being started is what executives love to see. 

- Ability to link with other Atlassian products

The fact that you're considering JSD in tandem with JIRA core and Confluence is the strongest indicator that this implementation would be successful. JSD is an amazing tool on its own, but when you bolster it with the ability to have a knowledge base (incorporating workflows or marketing standards) link off to a larger project and have everything syncing, that's a cost and time savings. 

With our teams, I find it so much easier to update in one place and then know that I don't have to log into additional systems for more updates to make sure everyone is notified. 

Hope that this answers some of your questions, or that someone with specific industry knowledge can weigh in as well.