Using Confluence for Project Management

[Laura Minen]

Hi! Is there a way to effectively use Confluence for Project Management? The team I'm working with would prefer to use Confluence instead of Jira to keep track of and collaborate in all of their activities. Thanks!

[Kristen Roth · Accepted solution]

Hey, @Laura Minen! I just stumbled upon your post and wanted to let you know we recently launched a new networking group for program and project management professionals: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Program-Management-Professionals/gh-p/program-management-professionals 

Just figured I'd give it a shoutout in case you'd be interested in joining like-minded folks there for discussion! 

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Because you can create tasks, assign them to people, represent the status with emojis, you can certainly use Confluence as a lightweight PM tool.

But, if you need more than these, like workflows, reports, etc., then Jira is much-much better.

If you don't want Jira's all complexity, coming Jira Software and Jira Service Management, then you could maybe try Jira Work Management, which is rather simple to get familiar with.

[Laura Minen]

Good call, Aron! Thanks!

[Danut M _StonikByte_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Laura Minen,

If you have both Jira & Confluence and the work items (tickets, tasks, stories, etc) are in Jira but you prefer to do the project tracking in Confluence, take a look at our Great Gadgets for Confluence Cloud app. 

It offers many macros that can be embedded in Confluence pages for creating powerful project reports. 

Our app offers all the tools needed for tracking projects, especially Scrum, Agile, SAFe or ISTM. You can find more use cases on our blog.

Danut.

[Laura Minen]

Thanks, Danut! I'll look into this too.

[Ivan Lima · Accepted solution]

Assuming you don't need a ticket system, yes. Have a look at https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/collections/project-management, where you'll find the PM templates collection.

You can achieve that in multiple ways using multiple artifacts. For example, you can have a page with a table where you have your tasks, resources, start/end date, status, etc. Meeting notes, technical and business documentation, etc. There are pretty good marketplace apps that can help you make your documentation more robust if needed.

Although the answer here could well be an article, I'll try to keep it short. I would only consider not tracking tasks in Jira if the project was simple enough that a table would suffice. There are many things to consider, such as stakeholders involved, scope, timeline, dependencies, etc. Also, it's a red flag when users prefer not to use Jira. I get that some users are allergic to Jira, which is typically associated with a bad experience due to poor configuration or many other reasons, which is another rabbit hole. 

In Confluence, for every project within your organization, it's a good practice to define a standard structure so people can navigate between projects more efficiently and not get lost when switching projects or starting a new one. For example, depending on the project, some organizations have different setups with lightweight sets of documentation/pages and more extensive ones for larger engagements. This is important to drive adoption and increase efficiency and all those fancy terms; otherwise, as you're facing with Jira, your users might come back and say they prefer something else. So, based on your question, you're on the right path here.

Keep it simple, friendly and sweet as a general rule of thumb. 99% of the time, the simplest does the job pretty well to kick things off, and you can adjust it as you go. Apologies if I haven't answered your question directly, but I'm sure others will chime in with their thoughts and experiences, which will contribute to getting you started here ;)

[Laura Minen]

Thank you for your detailed reply, Ivan. Your opinion is very helpful!