Advancing my Career with Atlassian

[#1]

My first position was a Business Analyst, working with a smaller-size software development team. During initial analysis, I noticed that documentation was stored in a decentralized location and software was being developed with minimal requirements or tracking. Based on my analysis, we acknowledged that documentation and project management tools were needed. After reviewing multiple options, we decided to purchase Confluence and Jira.

The first six months revolved around building a centralized knowledge base. In early stages, the objective was migrating thousands of procedures from network drives into Confluence. This helped end users get insight into account procedures and become more transparent about the business processes that we were running. While this helped the business process improve, it also helped me identify points for automation and improvements within the system. Today, Confluence is our standard for all documentation including account procedures, technical guides, compliance or infrastructure documents. We have three knowledge bases with about 2,000 pages total. After we identified all active processes and updated the procedures in Confluence, we found many areas of improvement.

I implemented a full project management solution using Jira. Jira has allowed us to build our own, customized, project management tool that makes sense for our development team. All areas for improvement, identified from process documentation, were turned into requirements for the software development team. In addition to process improvements, we also had to accommodate new sales orders and any operational enhancements for releases. This is when my role started to overlap between Business Analyst and Project Manager. While our process has changed often over the years, Jira’s dynamic configurations allowed us to implement these changes with ease. Today, Jira is our standard for software development projects across the entire business. We have over twenty projects, four boards and over 2,500 closed issues (remember we have a small team!). Long story short, Jira is awesome.

Personally, I migrated into a Product Manager role. Using Confluence and Jira has allowed me to evolve into this role over the past two years. Implementing agile project management solutions has guided me towards continued education, I hope to enroll in both Certified ScrumMaster and Project Management Professional certifications within the next year. Since I do some coding in my free time, I’ve recently migrated from Trello to Jira Cloud for side projects. I’m excited to watch Atlassian products continue to grow and stay active in the community going forward!

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Good to know that Jira and Confluence are helping you :)

Did you migrate to Confluence from another tool?

[Thomas B]

Thanks for reading @Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ ! We migrated from scattered network folders, across a few different storage devices to Confluence. The ability to drag word docs right into Confluence significantly helped. 

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Thanks for sharing your story @Thomas B :)

[Alexander Bondarev]

@Thomas B , good story, thanks!

Can you share your experience, what plugins do you use in Confluence?
- as I understand it, in the beginning, you often had to store files and scattered network folders that are familiar to everyone, subfolders and so on. How did you organize it first? What have been achieved over time?

- how do you differentiate access to pages(permissions), spaces, files? additional plugins or enough basic functional Confluence?

-how many people began to use Confluence?

- how was it possible to wean people from using of scattered network folders?

- what kind of documentation do you keep in Confluence?

- Do you use page templates?

Maybe you can tell other interesting facts based on daily experience:)

Thank you in advance!

[Thomas B]

@Alexander Bondarev & @Jodi LeBlanc thanks for reading!

• Plug-ins: Confluence's configuration (out of the box) fit our business needs, we don't use any plug-ins at this time. 
• Organization: We organized Confluence by Line of Business (for example, Finance / Software) and drilled down into accounts in the hierarchy. This helped us reflect a similar structure that was used on the network folders, bringing ease of use for end users. Now we are 100% using Confluence for all documentation, this was a 1 year implementation. 
• Permissions: For permissions across knowledge bases, we placed users into groups based on department and gave group access to portions of Confluence needed by those specific departments. We use similar groups with our Jira instance
• Usage: We started with only one user being an admin (myself) and gave anonymous access to internal use. Now we have 10 admins and still use anonymous access for internal use. Obviously anonymous users cannot edit / change anything. 
• Learning Curve: Based on our organizational structure, since we structured confluence similar to our existing network folders... the learning curve was relatively simple. 
• Types of Documentation: Procedures for Accounts, Software Documentation, Support Documentation and much more. Linking this to Jira Service Desk was very helpful. 
• Templates: We don't use any templates but we do have a 'standard' we created in Confluence. 

Hope this is helpful!

[Juan Castillo]

Great information. We are currently building a knowledge base in Confluence and migrating from Trello to Jira. Glad to hear a real-life example of how you benefited from both products.