Jira July Week 1: Making cross-functional collaboration go swimmingly well

[#1]

Ready for the first week of the Jiralympics challenge? Time to gear up and get those strokes ready for the exciting swim relay event!

(Psst… We’re giving away prizes throughout the month of July – read more about the Jiralympics challenge and prizes here.)

While swimming may seem like an individual sport, it’s also very much a team sport. In swim relays, four or more swimmers work together as a team to complete a race. Each team member swims a portion of the race, playing a role in the relay’s success. This requires seamless coordination across the team, smooth transitions, and team members to work toward a shared goal. And to add on, certain relays call for team members to specialize and finish their leg of the race in a different swim style.

Similar to your work teams, it takes individuals with different specializations and focus areas to align, collaborate, and execute toward the big picture. And the easiest tool to help get things done? Jira.

Using Jira helps your cross-functional projects move along smoothly. It's like having a secret weapon to speed up your team's progress, especially when you need to stay agile in a competitive market or simply want to streamline your projects. Jira brings together teams of individuals with different expertises, pushing them toward quicker project delivery and a stronger competitive edge.

Here are a few (out of many) ways to collaborate effectively and efficiently hand off tasks using Jira:

1. Organize work effortlessly: With Jira, you can effortlessly manage your tasks using various project views. Visualize and categorize work based on assignees, custom categories, priority, status, and more. Whether you prefer the Board view or List view, Jira makes it a breeze to stay organized.

2. Automate for efficiency: When it comes to getting things done, it's all about focusing on what really matters and automating the rest. With Jira's no-code automations, you can easily streamline tasks and processes with just a few clicks. And if you're looking to create a custom automation tailored to your team's unique requirements, you can make that happen too.

3. Stay connected seamlessly: Leverage apps and integrations like Slack, Teams, Google, and many others to ensure your team stays in the loop and meets everyone at their preferred communication spot. This way, you can make sure that every update gets the attention it deserves.

4. Keep tabs on progress in real-time: Check out how you're doing on tasks in a snap. Get a quick look at your team's progress, priorities, and workload with Summary view. Looking for a deeper dive? Use Plans (available in Jira Premium and Enterprise) to bring together tasks from various boards, projects, and filters for a comprehensive view that covers multiple teams.

By doing the above in Jira, your team can reach the project finish line in no time.

What team sport most relates to the way your team works? Are you like the rowing team, moving in the same direction with frictionless focus? Or are you a marathon runner that’s going at it solo?

[Amanda Barber]

I'm part of multiple teams and sort of feel more like a manager or a coach - providing guidance and support to various "players" each day!

[Stephen_Lugton]

I'm delivery manager for several teams.

One of those (known as Horologium as per our constellation naming conventions) closely resembles a curling team that has released their stone down the ice and is now frantically sweeping to try and get the stone to stop somewhere near their target!

Tomorrow's conversation with the stakeholders will be going something along the lines of we've done what you asked us to do, what you want us to do now hasn't been refined / prioritised, we have no requirements other than you asking 'why didn't you implement this' (hint: it was never asked for) and the CTO has noticed that you haven't even provided a business case for why we should be doing this, so this thing over here has a higher priority than what you're talking about, and we're going to go and do that instead.

[Bo Zhao]

Our team operates like a relay race, passing tasks from one member to the next until we reach the final goal.

[Kavitha Chandrasekaran]

Bringing transparency and clarity/collaboration through effective use of Jira dashboard. We integrate with other Marketplace reporting tools to summarise Jira data more effectively. 

[Anusha Ganipisetty]

I am very happy to here now, we are using roadmaps, Confluence and Jira and most through slack channel to communicate easily. Jira dashboards will helps us to complete more tasks like Competitive thing we love it. 

[Malene Vikkelsø]

I am a Jira Admin for several organisations, and I feel as the coach and the official at a football team. With each team, I am assisting them in understanding the rules and how best to play together - I am their teammate. But coming each match, I am still the coach assisting, but I also become the official ensuring the plays are allowed by the rules (governance).

[Walter Buggenhout]

Working for a Solutions partner, helping organisations optimise teamwork and processes across the entire organisation requires me to wear several hats. Sometimes that's a swimming cap, when diving into the deep together with the team to uncover the current way of working from the deepest depths. It may be a chef's hat, when I'm trying to develop a recipe to improve things. Sometimes it's the coach or trainer's cap in the stage where I help the teams adapt to the new processes and tools. And sometimes it's not even a hat, but rather the technician's gloves when tuning Jira to support the teamwork in the best possible way.

[Chrissy Clements]

If I were a Sports Player, I'd Be the Coxswain! 🧚‍♂️🚣‍♀️

Picture this: I'm the little Jira pixie perched at the front of the boat, shouting guidance and support to my team.

Not only am I steering the ship and keeping everyone on course, but I'm also the ultimate cheerleader, offering biased promotions of our favorite Atlassian products.

With a sprinkle of motivation and a dash of Jira magic, I'm helping our rowers pull together towards product(ivity) success.

Keep rowing, team!

[Autumn Hall]

My team is absolutely like a relay race. Perfect metaphor for the process of adding a new feature! It usually starts with the "first swimmer" being the product manager (my role) 🏊‍♀️💪 by defining requirements and writing the Jira ticket!

[NAYANA]

Kabaddi is the sport that most relates to the way our team operates. If you don't know about the sport, just google it :) Sometimes in ones and twos sometimes the entire team comes together for an all hands on deck approach either way we have a shared understanding and open communication going on. 

Kabaddi.. kabaddi.. kabaddii..

[Susan Waldrip]

We're a volleyball team -- working on our own for some things, working in pairs or as an entire team for others. Communication and teamwork are a "must" to keep from dropping the ball.

[Huwen Arnone _Deiser_]

My team works seamlessly as a football team (that sport you play with your feet and a ball😉) using Jira and specific Team Playbook best practices:

We're a company of different areas in the Development and business teams. I dare to compare us with a football team because each of us (teams) knows exactly the position we should be working on and defending. At the same time, we know how and when to collaborate and help each other.

[John Funk]

Our team is a group of Atlassian consultants often working with different clients. However, we all communicate at least weekly with each other to bring needs or issues to discuss. This allows us to work together on solving a problem that perhaps another team member has more expertise in. So I would say we are like the Medley relay team in swimming where each member of the relay does a different swim stroke, but all work together for Gold!

[Anusha Ganipisetty]

Our team, Master Minds, is constantly familiarizing ourselves with new Jira upgrades and upcoming career opportunities in Jira. Our main focus is to solve sprints on time. We have a passion for workflows and working status properties. I would liken our team to "PIZZA LOVERS"; we approach issue solving with the same love and dedication as finishing a slice of pizza.

[Brant Schroeder]

We are like a football (soccer) team. Everyone has specific duties but knows and sometimes has to act in a different role for the team to succeed.  It also requires us to all work together in order to proceed.

[Hana Kučerová]

As I'm still partly on a parental leave and work mostly during the evenings, I'm usually going at it solo. I have to be very effective and fast as I don't have much time, so I see me more as a sprinter.

[Antoine Berry]

As a member of the Atlassian administration's team, may I say I would act as a lifeguard ? I do not go swimming often but I try to optimize each team's efficiency.
So far, they all had their own little pond ; With the opening of Plans, all of our users can now swim in the same lake, but we need to ensure that they do so synchronously.

We still have a lot of perspectives ahead, and hopefully we will eventually be swimming in the ocean.

[Anusha Ganipisetty]

As a member of the Atlassian admin team, Swim lanes will be helpful like in Doordash App. Based on "Per Offer or Per Time" work will be designed and helps to understand how much you can make and how good it works. 

[Casey Gould]

Every Olympics, it feels like there's a sport or event I don't remember seeing before. At first, it can seem chaotic - you don't know the rules, don't know why something is offsides, and think you understand the objective until something else pops up. Because Jira is so customizable to each organization's use case and processes, it can feel like that -- you recognize the field and the basic mechanics, but not necessarily when or why certain things are happening. That's why onboarding and reference docs for your specific organization's ecosystem are so important!

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Most of the time I work solo. But I can do that because other people from my team can take that "extra" burden off of me, so I can do my work. The team sport that best mirrors how our team works with Jira would be the swim relay , where each swimmer has to complete by each own a specific run but at the same time must work seamlessly with their teammates. This teamwork ensures smooth transitions and progress toward company's goals.

[Summer Hogan]

My team is definitely most similar to the relay in swimming where the members of the relay do their part and then pass what they did to the next person where they do their part and so on and so forth until we reach the point where the work is done and is ready to be released.