Jira Software Cloud Administrators Guide: An Atlassian Community & Customer Success Collaboration

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Summary:

• Atlassian's Jira Software Cloud Customer Success team created an Onboarding Guide, pairing strategy and best practices to help new administrators  be successful in implementing and scaling Jira Software Cloud.
• Atlassian Community Champions reviewed the guide and provided great feedback and insights on guide.
• Check it out (link will open new tab): The Jira Software Cloud Administrators Guide

As part of the Customer Success Cloud team, @Matt Wong and I (@Sarah Schuster) frequently engage with some of our newer customers to understand their successes and challenges in Jira Software Cloud. From these insights come themes around where our customers are succeeding or frustrated, and opportunities to ease challenges in adoption and usage. 

In these engagements, one common theme we consistently see across all tiers of customers is "Am I doing this right?". Jira Software is a complex tool to administer, and there are a myriad of ways to do it right - and wrong. Our customers need Atlassian-produced content that helps them understand not the just the what, but 'how' each feature in Jira Software Cloud functions, as well as best practices in implementing these features. As a starting point to address this need, we decided to pilot an administrator-focused Onboarding Guide that stepped through each critical feature, strategies to help think through how to apply the feature to a business need, best practices on implementing that feature, and finally, links to official technical documentation (for the how-to).

To begin, Matt and I created an outline of how a user might typically navigate through Jira Software Cloud, from administering the instance settings, inviting and managing users, creating and administering projects, issues and workflows, on through to Rollout. To help make the content more broadly and immediately applicable, we wanted to include common, real-world use cases our customers want to achieve through Jira Software Cloud. To get these use cases, we started the Jira Lessons Learned series in Atlassian Community. The responses from Community members were incredible examples of practical advice, clever tips and tricks, and concrete use cases to include in our guide.

Once we finished the first draft, we wanted to gut-check the Guide with those in Community who have implemented Jira Software across multiple teams and companies. We had already seen fantastic engagement on the discussion threads and we were hoping to get the same feedback on our guide.

First step was recruiting. We posted an open call in Community for Champion help in reviewing this guide (with the promise of swag). We were able to get nine volunteers (see below @mentions)! We created a private Confluence site that enabled the Champion reviewers to privately see the draft content and leave detailed feedback via inline comments. We also created a dedicated Stride room shared between Matt, myself and the reviewers. This enabled us to quickly answer any questions and issues found during the review. 

The detailed feedback left by the Champions was incredibly insightful. Everyone left detailed feedback on a page-by-page level, even adding to or supporting previous comments left by the other Champion reviewers. One reviewer actually reviewed the guide (a 40-page document, mind you) multiple times for grammar, structure and technical accuracy!

Thanks to their feedback, we felt greater confidence that our Onboarding Guide will position all users for success in Jira Software Cloud.

We will be emailing this to all new customers starting in early-May. However, we wanted to give you all a sneak peek at the result of the hard work done by all involved in this effort.

(Link will open new tab): The Jira Software Cloud Administrators Guide

We would like to send very special "Thank you"s to: @Arun_Thundyill_Saseendran, @[deleted], @[deleted], @Dave Theodore, @Davin Studer, @Jack Brickey, @Kian Stack Mumo Systems, @Mahesh S and @Walter Buggenhout. Without these talented and dedicated Champions, we wouldn't have created the fantastic pilot Onboarding Guide as it exists today.

Stay tuned as we measure and share our findings on this experiment in future posts!

[Monique vdB]

Thank you to the wonderful Champions who helped with this guide! ❤️ ⭐️

[Bridget]

+1 to what @Monique vdB said! Thank you Atlassian Champs <3 

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Thank you! It is awesome result!

[Herman Xiao]

This is very helpful. Thanks so much.

[Dave Liao]

This guide makes me happy! I've mentored my share of Jira admins, will be adding this to my onboarding wiki 😊

[vitaliy zapolskyy]

great news!

however I'm getting "Hmmm...can’t reach this page" for the http://bit.ly/JSWCAdminGuide unfortunately - was it expired?

[Peter Szmyt]

The text looks great. It would probably be better if I could see any of the images.

[Sarah Schuster]

@vitaliy zapolskyy - Thanks for the heads up!

I'm wondering if bit.ly is being weird. I'm seeing a huge spike of traffic to the site reported as well. 

I am seeing the same error message as you when I click on your bit.ly link. If you click directly on the link from this page (and not copy/paste the bit.ly link) does that work? I can click on the links directly from this page and it opens the guide - and images are displaying. 

Others - let me know if you are experiencing the same issue as well, and if you can access the guide links from this page.  If not, here is a direct link: (Direct Link) Jira Admin Onboarding Guide

[Taryn]

I am able to use the direct link with no issues, but the bit.ly link gives me the same issue as others.

I am looking forward to going through all of the information provided in this guide.  Thanks for creating it!

[Peter Szmyt]

No images for me. I've tried multiple devices, browsers and accounts.

For example, on this page https://confluence.atlassian.com/guide-for-new-jira-software-cloud-administrators/key-terms-to-know-949247992.html

there should be workflow but it is not loading and the link for the image is https://confluence.stg.internal.atlassian.com/download/attachments/936547606/Screen%20Shot%202018-03-28%20at%203.23.21%20PM.png?version=1&modificationDate=1522268631576&api=v2

which results in server IP address could not be found.

[Matt Doar]

Is there a way to get an exported PDF file of all the pages in the Guide? It's much faster to read and mark up

[Taryn]

I would love an exported PDF as well!

[Sarah Schuster]

Regarding PDFs - Great suggestion. Let me look into this internally and get back to you all!

@Taryn

[Francesco Santi]

Thanks for the guide.

[Eduard Diez]

I would like to have the documentation in PDF, confluence, jira and Service Desk. someone knows how I can get it? Because the link that @Peter Szmyt puts It does not work. Is dead.

Thank's

[Len Winfield]

now january 2019 and still not showing images in the pages , and still no PDF export?

[dilipkumar23bytes]

Needful guide... Thanks