Top Quotes from Atlassian Team 2021 - Part 1

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Atlassian Team 2021, formally known as Summit, is the annual user conference. This event brings Atlassians, customers, users, and partners together for a few magical days of announcements, demos, and discussions. This year Atlassian created the ultimate digital experience to discuss the evolution of modern work, building better teams, scaling innovation, and thriving in an increasingly digital and distributed world.

Here are my favorite quotes from the 2021 Atlassian user conference.

“Simply using Jira doesn’t mean you’re agile.”

– Claire Drumond, Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Jira Software and Agile

I audibly laughed at this statement during Claire Drumond’s session titled “Jira brings agile to all teams“. I’ve completed over a hundred consulting projects and I’ve yet to encounter a real agile team. Organizations hire consultants to “make them agile”, use tools and terminology to “become agile”, and sometimes simply declare they are “switching to agile” – tomorrow! The teams that say they’re agile, sure look more “wagile” (a mixture of “waterfall” and “agile”) to me.

What I love about Jira is that it can support any framework or methodology – including no methodology at all. You can configure Jira to match the way you work. Even so, one day, I hope to see a truly agile team in action. I’d love to personally experience the efficiencies gained from how agile is meant to work. Until then, I’ll keep observing and learning.

“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself let automation do it.”

– John McKiernan, Atlassian Product Marketing Manager, Jira Software

As John McKiernan said in his “Make Jira work for you with automation” presentation, “this is the automation age.” For many of us, Jira is mission critical software and the single source of truth in our organizations. Because “Jira never sleeps”, you can use automation to make it your personal assistant. If you’re new to building automation rules in Jira Cloud, check out this demo to quickly get started. Automation is a fun topic but John’s terrific sense of humor and self-described “monotone Irish voice” makes this a useful and entertaining Team 2021 session.

“Include Jira issue keys in your development work and Jira will update itself!”

– Justine Davis, Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, DevOps

Meet Atlassian’s new Jira integration solution, Open DevOps. It’s “a pre-configured DevOps project that combines Atlassian products with partner offerings” you’re already using like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Jenkins, and more. Atlassian reduced the ~50 steps needed to connect all your tools together to just six! I’ve always encouraged users to include Jira issue keys in code commits, in notes in other tools, and in email subject lines. Now that good habit pays off even more. Issue keys link everything together, allowing Jira to update itself, inform stakeholders, and provide better project tracking and insight.

Watch “How high-velocity Dev and Ops teams fuel digital transformation” or learn more at atlassian.com/solutions/devops.

“Team Central makes updates as easy as a Tweet.”

– Claire Maynard, Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, New Products & Solutions

Jira and Confluence can surface progress data, but it’s still difficult to aggregate information, from all the individual tasks, to understand project status as a whole. Enter Team Central, Atlassian’s new solution to curate information and provide real-time status updates. I hope one day soon we can all cancel our status meetings and use the new views in Team Central instead.

I’m also really excited about the external collaboration feature coming to Confluence Premium and Enterprise.

Watch “Thrive like a hive: Elevate business team performance ” or read more at: atlassian.com/team-central

See part 2

[Taranjeet Singh]

That's a really great, informative, and thought-provoking article. Thanks for sharing, @Rachel Wright