Hello Atlassian Community

[William Naughton]

Hi, my name is Bill and I work at a small company outside Boston.  I am a big fan of the Atlassian tools.  I am a Jira Admin and an evangelist who works on promoting our Confluence and Jira tools across the organization.  I have a question.  What do you find is the best method to get people onboard?  Is it communities of practice, training, a combination of the two?  

Thanks and I look forward to being an active participant in the community.

[Alexander Bondarev]

Hello, @William Naughton !
Welcome to the community!

Personally, my opinion is that getting people to switch to this or that tool is difficult and wrong.

But since we all know that JIRA and Confluence are the best tools for specific needs, we need to help people understand and try it!

If we talk about JIRA, then you need to start by analyzing the processes, decompose them and taking into account all the possibilities of JIRA to automate them. At the same time, people should see improvements in their processes, processes should become understandable, visual for everyone, the communication threshold decreases and joint comfortable work begins(collaboration).

If we talk about Confluence, then here you also need to understand “What does your company and your colleagues need?”, For example, implement a wiki or an intranet portal.
Use all the capabilities of the tool, show how to do it correctly, post interesting material to involve collegues - over time, people themselves will ask you to give them the opportunity to use the tool!

As a result, I believe that you need to listen to your colleagues and correctly understand their needs, and then choose the right tool and use all its possibilities!

As a member of the community, you can always ask us a question or share your experience! Good luck!

[William Naughton]

I like the mindset "what are their needs and how can the tools help them".  I also like the point about listening.  Always a key trait to exploit.  Thanks.

[Helen Griffiths {Capgemini}]

Hi @William Naughton 

Have you thought about running an internal Atlassian User Group? I run our internal Capgemini Atlassian User Groups, and they're great for showing casing the applications - not in a 'look at this Jira functionality' way, but in a sense of showcasing how to use the Atlassian applications to help your teams work better together. 

A couple of examples of internal presentations we've done are:

• Requirements Management in Jira & Confluence
• Jira Service Desk: The art of the possible for ANY team
• Tracking business opportunities in Jira

By showing our teams how to use the applications to help make their work life easier works a lot better for us, and the feedback we receive from teams about time savings etc is great.

Brownbags sessions are great for quick snippets of info share. Perhaps look at getting some fundamentals training sessions set up to give your teams the basics they need to get going.

Hope this helps 😊

[William Naughton]

Great ideas and feedback.  Thanks Helen!

[Helen Griffiths {Capgemini}]

No problem Forgot to mention, if your teams don't currently use Jira and want to learn the basics, check out the free Atlassian University training offerings here (https://training.atlassian.com/free-training-catalog). These are really great for those who don't have a lot of time, but want to understand a concept of Jira or the other Atlassian applications (and now a few Marketplace add-ons too!)

[Erica Moss]

@William Naughton Welcome, welcome! We're so glad you're here. Looks like you're already getting great responses, and be sure to check out our member journey and threads like Friday Fun. 😄

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Welcome @William Naughton ! These are all great suggestions. Also, you can start working with other groups and sharing your experience with them. Little by little, if a number of groups see the value and start using the Atlassian tool set, others may(will) follow. Baby steps :-) . Good luck!

[Ian Kaplan]

I think that the way to get people to use Jira and Confluence is to start using them on a project.

If you make Jira the tool for bug and activity tracking people will use it.

The same thing is true with Confluence. I have worked on several projects that started out with little documentation. We started documenting on Confluence and the documentation grew to the point where to find items search had to be used.