Best team practices using Atlassian products

[Celina Zamora]

One of the questions I receive from organizations who join the Atlassian Company User Group program is, "how are other companies using Atlassian products?" As this support program grows, the most valuable effort to gain insight into other use cases is by sharing their own. 

With that said, let's begin sharing.

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?
• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?
• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

[Brant Schroeder]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works? By moving all of our communications within Atlassian products and making it a requirement our teams/team members have become more accountable to each other.  There is no more passing the buck or pointing the finger because the issues show what has happened and if it is not there then it never happened.  

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge? When I was hired customer service, responsiveness, etc. was pretty low.  I implemented service desk which allowed us to track performance and see if we were meeting the SLAs established with our customers.  Service desk helped change culture and improve our customer service, responsiveness, communication, etc. with our customers within a very short period of time.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey? Change can be good.  If change is implemented properly it is good.

[Celina Zamora]

Thank you for sharing, Brant! 

[Jan-Peter Rusch]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

We moved from source based information distribution to consumer demanded delivery of information. The user (consumer) decides what is of importance for him. The creator (source) doesn't have to make his mind up about whom to inform about news & update. This is a major shift in dealing with information.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

Our remote workforce is now integrated much closer to what is happening in our headquarter. We got away from having multiple sources of truth for a single information/documention by storing & versioning it in Confluence. Most surprising was the fact that although not promoted or taught by IT blogging in Confluence lifted off by itself. Departments just started using it & it became the main information source in our intranet. Our Quality Management documentation was kept in various files & directories on a file server. Keeping it uptodate was a nightmare. This was easily handled within a space & with a workflow addon and another read confirmation addon we found a perfect solution for all the issues we had before.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

How creative our users are. They come up with new ideas all the time. I never imagined this before. Trust your users & keep information open to everyone. Do not try to rebuild a directory structure know from a fileserver in Confluence or a confluence space. Our users tended to think in directories & files. Getting this out of their head is sometimes a difficult task.

[Celina Zamora]

Thank you for sharing this! I love hearing "trust your users and keep information open to everyone". Transparency and developing an environment open to sharing team best practices really provides such a solid opportunity to help overall work efficiency. 

[C]

The biggest impact Atlassian has on our organization was task management.   In our previous life, we had MS Project plans providing a high-level overview managed by project manager, outdated excel files emailed between teams with the tasks needing to be completed, and a bug tracking software that was disconnected from all solutions. 

Atlassian's JIRA and JIRA Agile, shifted the way teams organized their tasks and managed their work. This change fueled the self-empowerment movement and allowed our teams to consolidate from 3 to 5 isolated solutions to single integrated platform.   Our development teams experienced upwards to a 30% increase in productivity from being able to collaborate and plan together. 

Additionally, the flexibility of JIRA and rich features sets allows us to experiment and adjust our process, workflows, and fields we used in real time.  There was a couple of time that we made process changes mid-sprint without teams missing a beat because ideas we implemented from our retrospectives did not work as we had intended. 

Today, we have engineered a process with JIRA that allows us to control our entire portfolio using JIRA while providing teams the flexibility to operate as they wish.

[Celina Zamora]

Awesome Christian! "This change fueled the self-empowerment movement and allowed our teams to consolidate from 3 to 5 isolated solutions to single integrated platform"...is incredibly powerful. Thanks for sharing!

[Misty Blake-Knox]

We first started using JIRA software about three years ago to manage the largest project in the history of our organization.  We managed tasks, actions, configuration items, defects, and even test cases in JIRA.  As the project wound down, we continued to use JIRA for vendor defects, and internal development (which is mostly building interfaces).  We also used it to track change requests for our ERP.

As we begin to be in 'operation mode' we noted that the software we were using to create helpdesk tickets wasn't meeting our needs.  It's reporting capability was very limited, we had difficulty controlling email notifications, and the interaction between our first and second level teams got lost because it was all in email.

About 6 months ago we rolled out JIRA service desk.  Users are entering tickets into the portal.  Our first level team is easily able to escalate tickets to our second level team.  Tickets are now linked to vendor defects.  It has been a huge success.

In the next year I am hoping to start using JIRA to manage our change control and start getting our other IT department to start using JIRA so we can be on the same system.

[Ashley Elder]

Thanks for sharing, Misty! Glad to hear it has been a huge success. 

[Gianni Pucciani]

Hello all,

Joining the AUG, here is our experience.

We rolled-out Jira with an IT project, analysing Use Cases and defining the wanted release management process.

Today we use Jira to manage Requirements, Implementation Tasks, Tests and Defects. Crucible and FishEye are getting ready to join as well as Confluence.

Main impact: visibility, traceability, standardization and hence a better control of our releases. Less effort in reporting statuses to managers.

We use a well defined metamodel for all the IT projects, with a Jira project mapped to an IT application.

[Ashley Elder]

Gianni, thanks for sharing! Using JIRA to analyze use cases is very interesting. Glad to hear that you've had significant impact while using the product.

[Jonathan Chatwin]

JIRA use at our organization has enabled many key customer facing and non-customer facing teams to better manage their current capacity and work planning. The main shift is in our call centre, where they use JIRA to manage capacity. Before JIRA the idea of capacity and who was doing what, and how much of that, was unattainable. We recently had the busiest fiscal year ever, and feedback has been that it did not feel that busy as JIRA has enabled capacity planning and reporting. It has been a game changer for this team among others. 

The main challenge before was trying to figure out how much and of what this team was doing in a time period. JIRA has solved this and overcome signifgant challenges not only in this use case, but in many other across our organization. 

[Celina Zamora]

Thank you for sharing, Jonathan! 

[Alexis Bennett]

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?
  • My introduction to Atlassian was through client work. I'd come from publishing, so we'd used Trello (a little), but most of our work was managed in Word docs passed around and printed. In my current role, we use Jira and Confluence to manage internal projects, document processes and progress, and collaborate. I can't imagine going back to the paper and pen method!
• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?
  • Atlassian's Jira was used as an interim solution for a client to track unfinished project work after a Global ERP system implementation. The Web and hardware development teams already used Atlassian, so we thought, why not make use of the license? The transparency around the work improved dramatically. They've since implemented Jira Service Desk as their global ticketing system for infrastructure and application requests. There's still a lot of work to be done, but at least there's visibility what it is, who's got the ball, and status. Crazy awesome!
• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?
  • We learned a lot about Confluence, Jira, and Service Desk generally. We realized how valuable the intergrations between tools with different functionality can be---there's no piecemealing. There's still much to learn, but we're eager! More importantly, we learned how to manage our internal work more efficeiently.

[Celina Zamora]

Thanks for sharing, Alexis! This is great! 

[Alex Khoroshko]

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

I am lucky, and I work with JIra and confluence from the start, and each time I must to use some other tool I convinced again that there is nothing better than Jira+confluence for the task managment. 

• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

As QA engineer I have been involved to test and manage testing process in team, we have to test game on 12+ languages on 6 platforms (72) and report issues to separate development teams with some uniq proceses, I have worked with a lot of bugtracking systems but I can say that Jira is the best choise for the bug management, we like all the functions, we use search by description and comments to filter some part of tickets and many of other tricks in out work!)

• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Maybe that the more functional the product has, the better product is. Integration between tools it's a great advantage of atlassian

[Celina Zamora]

It's great to hear that our tools have been the top choice for you. Thanks for sharing your experience with us, Alex! 

[Nour Durra | Oslo]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

Agility. the level of customization and flexibility makes it easy to get things done. In addition to the visibility that helped eliminating bottle necks .

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

As mentioned above, bottle necks are almost gone, since we work extremely agile, we don't afford the long wait for someone  to finish a certain task. boradd shows where tasks are, calendar shows where the people are, so we always have someone to help fix/implement/etc etc.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

the product is owned by the whole team

[Betsy Joy [AUG - Dubai]]

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?
  • The Atlassian products have helped us to get more organised and thus shorten the delivery time.
• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?
  • We had information lying all over the place in bits and pieces. Atlassian products have been a boon in collecting all of them and placing them in order in one place accessible to all.
• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?
  • Great tools + Great people = Great projects :)

[Kris Stewart]

Helpful info!

[Jeff Tillett]

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?
  • Atlassian tools have brought a degree of transparency never thought possible with IT work. We have confluence reports, backed by JIRA data, made public to all users of our organization to show what projects IT Operations has in flight, who is working on them, and how they are making progress towards completion.
• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?
  • We used JIRA software and Confluence to plan our migration from JIRA Cloud to JIRA software. We used the project poster to convey a clear understanding of the landscape across the entire organization, and broke our action items out into projected 1 week sprints so that the business would have an expection on when certain milestones would be acheived, and when they could expect to have their new requests impletmented. This level of planning allowed everyone to be on the same page and manage their expectations throughout a complex project.
• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?
  • Up front investment in documentation and planning is worth it's weight in gold once you start working on a project!

[Ashley Elder]

Awesome, @Do Not Use! Thanks for sharing.

[Abhishek Aggarwal]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

• In simple words it helped to integrate/respond to continuos customer feedback/changes through some structured way and we can monitor as well. Good transparency indeed!
• Team got self-organizsed and delivered meaningful metrics/reports to management and stakeholders with right data sets.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

• Integrated Atlassian tools stack with development and Ops team  to bring CI-CD and full control over iterative delivery

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

• Continuous learning and improvements. Effective agile project and portfolio management

[Myke Bates]

We are in the process of using the webhooks in Jira to post data out to our servers which lets us do some really inventive things with the content such as alerting and storing notifications for use in an internal desktop app that our developers run and customize for their own use.

[Lindsay Czopur]

How has my team evolved using Atlassian products? 

Our teams know that if it doesn't live in JIRA, it doesn't exist.  We rely heavily on JIRA for all development tasks, making transparency of project progress as simple as checking a team board. Some key things we have done to inspect and adapt how we use JIRA include:

• Making a new issue type for "Customer-Reported Bug" so that we know an issue was found in the field
• Adjusting workflows to add a "Ready to Test" state so that the teams know when an issue is ready to pick up for testing
• Added an "Undo Transition" add-on when our devs get a little too antsy on the status change trigger
• Added meeting time-tracker add-on so that we can log time for a group of people at a time for meeting purposes
• Added the automate creation of two sub-tasks with every User Story or Bug issue type creation
• Adding the automatic transition of main issues as a post-function when sub-tasks are transitioned into a specific status
• Automatically assigning development sub-task to the user who is assigned the main issue type and vice versa so there is one main developer responsible for seeing the issue closed out
• Adding teams as groups so that comments can be sent to entire groups if questions arise during development
• Adding a specific project time
• Creating swimlanes in a variety of ways - based on priority, project, components, etc. on Kanban barods
• Creating specific issue types with specific field configurations for a group outside of development to use and organize tasks

We keep any and all documentation on Confluence.  We specifically adhere to the following rules, which has helped to organize our world at work:

• Create an agenda page for every meeting with a notes section so that all meeting notes are documented (and include the link to the notes area in the meeting invite!)
• Attach recordings of meetings in Confluence so that the live meeting can be reviewed as needed (not all meetings, but a designated few are ALWAYS recorded)
• Keep team spaces where technical documentation or team-specific documentation can live
• Keep copies of release notes in Confluence to keep these pages live and active with every new release
• Document any and all processes with "How-To" pages, specific to each department
• Put business cases prior to starting on big features in Confluence template Poster Project so that all teams involved have a mutual understanding

In HipChat, the rules are little bit more loose, but typically our team follows these key guidelines (the first being always keep HC open!):

• @ a person if you need a direct answer in a room - don't expect them to see your message (or go one-to-one)
• Create relevant aliases that will be directed to specific groups
• Form a chat room when you need it - discussing a field issue, discussing a project that affects multiple teams, etc.
• Have fun!  Install Sassy bot and vote on the best and worst Giphy's of the week

Atlassian products are integrated into literally everything we do and help our teams move forward each and every day in an Agile way!  

[Monique vdB]

I love it @Lindsay Czopur!

[Ammar Hassan]

This was more helpful as it explained in detail, like HOW this team has practically used Jira for enhancing team capabilities to achieve agile. 

[Dan Moran]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

We've really gained a lot by using HipChat to help move closer and closer to a real chatops model. It's been a great way to automate lots of our ops-related work.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

Jira has been the central pillar in our effort to develop a strong Agile/Scrum practice. The flexibility and power offered by Jira have been awesome to work with.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

We learned that although tools aren't as important as good communications and clear processes, they are an essential aspect of creating highly productive teams.

[Celina Zamora]

Thanks for sharing @Dan Moran! 

[Danny _Newcastle_UK_]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

It has allowed each team to be adaptable depending on the project type they are currently working on; some projects follow a Scrum method, while others follow a Kanban approach to their workload. Each team develops or maintains a product or service so the Atlassian products we have incorporated have been adapted to suit each team's needs. 

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

The products we use have given us a "one source of truth" to our products and their development. Communication through Atlassian for each team has become a daily standard for receiving updates. 

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Change is slow however it is never ending; whether this is the demand for user process change or demand for tools to change for their users. Change is inevitable and using Atlassian products has become a integral pillar for the progress of change. 

[Kelly Albrecht _Western Massachusetts_]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

Atlassian has filled in a lot of gaps in how we work in general. It has been a great compliment to our effort to move push to pull models of task assignment.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

We use Jira Software and Service Desk to close the gaps in, and tightly integrate, our development and operational efforts. This has been a significant challenge with other platforms.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Make sure to learn how Atlassian intends their tools to be used and try that first before leveraging the all the possible customizations. 

[Theophilus Omoregbee]

• The most is version control of all our source code, since we don't have to think about that process, all we just focus on is how to collaborate efficiently.
• Also, the introduction of pipeline burst our CI process, and our build process is seamless since we don't need to always take a day to do that anytime a breaking change is pushed to the repo.

[Deleted user]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

We have slowly integrated all our processes and tracking of work into Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket as opposed to email, excel, etc. The questions, responsibilities, and finger pointing has greatly decreased due to processes being defined and communicated through the tools.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

We are in the process of shifting to be agile and the tools support for this has been great. I often find that if we are doing something Jira can't handle well it is often because of a process issue rather than a tool issue.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Communication has been the key to getting people on board with our new processes and tools. Once someone is used to them and really starts using them it solves a lot of other communication issues. As adoption has spread it has snowballed into greater use of the tools for a lot of tasks we had never considered before.

[Marat Kiniabulatov]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

We've started using the whole package of jira / confluence / bitbucket right from the start, as we wanted the whole ecosystem. Whe I joined the company, I simply optimized the workflow in jira, to better reflect the team. The automation and triggers played a big part of why I like to use jira. However thanks to atlassian products - distributed teams are much more comfortable to work on complex projects.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

I've been able to standardize different issue types to meet certain criterias when created. I also was able to help PO team to create their own workflow, which amazingly made requirements preparation more transparent and easy-to-use. Moreover, thanks to the integration of jira > bitbucket PR's attached are easy to see.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Involve people in making the process and workflow, so that it's a collaborative process. And they will be investing their interest and time into learning task tracking tool , better usage and giving more suggestions. After all, people are the main investment in the cmpany, and you want everyone work happily together!

[Fabian A. Lopez (Community Leader - Argentina, Florida, California)]

Thanks Community Team... here is my 2 cents feedback

• What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?
  • The most important for us is transparency and traceability. As we completed the phase 1 of our Confluence and Jira implementation for our Software Development team we realized that the platform is encouraging team members to participate on the generation of active content. The seamlessly integration between Confluence and Jira allows the team to be able to generate content in Confluence and use Jira for better tracking purposes. With previous tool some of our team members were frustrated because after spending a lot of time creating documents they were not actively used and they were just stored on the document repository (also referred as the Graveyard of documents). They can see now that their work is active even after the delivery as they connect the content with Jira projects issues.
• How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?
  • Traceability was a challenge for us (and still is in some aspects). By implementing the tools and modifying some of the processes in place we will be able to overcome some of the blockers we have with others tools previously used
• What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?
  • I think it was not having fear to openness. As organization, the team was able to see that sharing knowledge and having access to it in a collaborative platform will help more than just having silos with restricted access. 

[Mitzi Moncada]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

We now can measure development objectives and not just know wheter it was late or not. With the metrics available to us now we can have a better management along the projects.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

Working with deadlines and specific priorities is so much easier, as well as having bitbucket and confluence makes it faster to get in context with a specific task.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

We mainly learned to get the thigns needed to no underdeliver and also learned the points to start getting better faster.

[Tanya C]

Newbie online... :)  Getting my AUG 'sea legs'.  I'll answer the canned questions but first I have two perspectives.  The first is from the eyes of a 'user' .. as an engineer on a web application development team the second being an Atlassian product support teammate & Customer Outreach lead. 

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

User Confluence along with JIRA to collaborate and organize requirements as well as communications, instructions and all artifacts involved in the development workflow.

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

With the use of Scrum Agile boards our development team was able to get up and running.  Being able to group issues, visualize them in the active Sprint made understanding what we were working on during the sprint easy.  In prior development attempts getting a handle on what we were doing was difficult.  We were in spreadsheet quicksand at times.  Jira let us better visualize many aspects of our development process.

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

The journey is never over.  :) Our team learned we can collaborate faster and development with transparency.  Linking JIRA issues directly into Confluence pages, meeting notes etc taught us that finding content, requirements, stories and issues was easy.  Many times there were the sounds or 'oooh' and 'aah' as we presented tables of issues for reports, Dashboards for monitoring and meeting notes with clearly marked actions and actionees. 

...

Note: Many groups tend to do one or two things 'by the book' and then veer off to tailored approaches.  This can be good in some respects but if you're an 'old dog' you may miss out on the 'new tricks' that are out there.  Keep you eyes open for new ways - don't try to mold the new tool to your old ways.

[Manjith Pillai]

What is one way Atlassian products have shifted the way your team works?

Atlassian products, specifically Jira and confluence have shifted the way we plan & execute projects and the way we manage artifacts of the projects.  

How have Atlassian products helped your team overcome a significant challenge?

Confluence have helped our team in elicitation and documentation of requirements of our products and helped in planning a high level product road map and organised all documents related to product in one place. 

Jira helped us in running the development in both Scrum and Kanban ways. 

What was the main thing your team learned during this journey?

Learned ways to increase productivity