Advancing my Career with Atlassian

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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!