Teams - how are you using this when in a big company?

[Susanne Harelius]

Hi! I am a bit curious on how you all use the team feature in cloud. We are a company with around 800 teams so doing this manually is not an option. We have been using Jira DC for a long time and there we built a solution using Insight (soon to be called Assets). We sync with our ldap/hr system and get all the info we need. Then we can use this in different fields. Except if we want to use Advanced Roadmaps since it does not support insight fields. 

So we are now trying to move to Jira cloud and have a couple of challenges. Insight is mostly integrated to JSM and we are being blocked by this so need to dig into the team field since that seems to be supported. 

What we just learned today is that the team in Advanced Roadmaps is NOT the same as the one under People menu. 
How is this even possible? 
So - how are you all doing this? :) 

[Susanne Harelius]

I was just reminded about this: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Advanced-Roadmaps-articles/Advanced-Roadmaps-Team-unification-Sign-up-to-take-part-in-the/ba-p/2084987#U2086113

[Haddon Fisher]

I haven't played with it extensively but I think it's mostly useful for @mentioning groups at once. You can't use it in project roles, automation rules, user-picker picker, or anything like that as far as I know.

[Susanne Harelius]

Mentioning would be really nice! 
Would be really nice to have a Custom field typ for teams. We use insight where we have Responsible team, Involved team(s), Reporter team etc. Really really useful. 

[Kelly Arrey]

We're a much smaller shop, but we ran into arbitrary limitations like you can't specify which Team a sub-task should be associated with, and the confusion around "Team" vs "Advanced Roadmaps Team", and eventually just reverted to Jira Groups and a custom field we call Agile Team, which at least works for us. We sync our users but not our groups from LDAP to Atlassian Access. We maintain the groups manually in Atlassian Access. Usual disclaimers apply: Deuces are wild, YMMV, void where prohibited by law, etc.

[Haddon Fisher]

I'd +1 the "teams" picker field. I have in the past included the Jira project key of that team's project - this is very useful when you want Automation to do something like make a ticket in that project or projects :)

[Susanne Harelius]

Ah, we now actually have the org groups synced so that could be an alternative. Just feels sooo limited when spoiled with the functionality of Insight... 

[Haddon Fisher]

Only a wee bit jealous that you're syncing groups :) Someday...someday...

[Kelly Arrey]

Another reason we get much more value out of a custom Select List field than we get from the Teams field is that we can write JQL like this: 

"Agile Team" = A-Team 

If you try this with the Team field:

Team = A-Team

You get no hits!!!!! This is a very misleading result.

In order to get this to work at all, you have to crawl through a bit of broken glass:

• Autocomplete for the team name doesn't work if you just type

Team =

• You have to accept the autocomplete for Team or type it out in full

"Team[Team]" =

Only then will you see the autocomplete pulldown for Team names. When you select the team you want from the list, then Jira puts the Team Number into the query.

So basically you have a field that you can neither write nor read easily in JQL. This is another reason we went back to our Select List field that just works.

[Susanne Harelius]

Oh my god! That seems like crazy. I sooo much wish for the support of Insight. We LOVE that using Insight in our DC environment. 

[Tomislav Tobijas]

As far as I know, Atlassian is working on refactoring the whole 'People & Teams' experience. This actually started with the development of Atlas (former Team Central).

There are no official announcements yet, so I guess it won't be shipped this year, but the main idea is to improve the whole experience of using People and Teams features across all Atlassian products. This would include the ability to sync additional attributes such as Manager (already available via Okta) or Team. Apart from that, unifying Teams between the Atlassian People section and Advanced Roadmaps is (was) also one of the main points.

Additionally, the Org chart in Atlas is one of the features that is listed as Coming soon, so there might be some improvements once that is shipped.

For now, as others have also mentioned, we're using Teams mostly for @mentions and sometimes to check team activity. Additionally, we're testing the Help directory in Atlas and therefore Help articles and links connected to a specific team.

[Susanne Harelius]

Looking forward to the new functionality, but will surely miss all the nice features we have using Insight.