Introduction: Project Management Pages

[Kevin Dow]

Hello, all.

I'm a program manager based in the southern US working about 6 months now with a software company. I'm focusing on improving our PM maturity and using Confluence pages for communicating project information to our stakeholders. I'd be very interested to see how others in the community have used Confluence for this purpose and get some fresh, new ideas on ways to use it effectively! I'd love to see links, screenshots, explanations - whatever you've seen that you like!

Thanks!

[Silvia ORTIZ]

In every page is very useful to have a table of contents.

When providing instructions like a step by step or using confluence as a knowledge sharing spot avoid as much as you can adding links to other pages. I personally find it confusing, misleading and annoying when I'm looking for some guidelines where I have to navigate within several links in order to understand the full context.

I mean If you create a page about Project Management and have methodologies as a topic (SRUM, Kanban, PMI/PMBOK, Prince2) describe them all in the same page (make the reader to be focus on the main goal of the page) and prevent them to be distracted by going on several links to other confluence pages.

[Kevin Dow]

That's useful, @Silvia ORTIZ . Thanks!

[Noah - Devsamurai]

Love this one. The table of contents makes all the things nice and neat and also easy to follow-up.

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

Hi, @Kevin Dow. In general, it's not common to see this sort of detail shared on the community. Don't be too disappointed if you don't see a lot of responses. Plus, in my experience, every org. is different when it comes down to the specifics. 

That said, I have two thoughts:

• Look into the Atlassian Team Playbook. Not only can read all you want (with examples), there are frequent in-person and online events related to them. For example, there are playbooks for Aligning on Team Goals and Creating Team Alignment (and more).     
• If possible, get involved in your local ACE (if there's one near you). Personal connections are much more likely to share the details you seek.

Also, you may want to consider attending Team '24, Atlassian's largest customer/partner event of the year—again, to make those personal connections.

Hope this helps,

-dave

[Kevin Dow]

Thanks, @Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ . I really appreciate your input and steering me in this direction.

[Joanna Weber]

Are you talking about specific apps or things like page structure?

I'm a UX Researcher, so I'm storing research project documentation, and one of the things we have to be absolutely intentional about is the page structure. There are two UX methods that can be helpful here:

1. Card sorting - before creating any pages, create cards (or virtual cards e.g. post-it notes on Miro) with topic names and then 'buckets' (e.g. Miro frames) with section names, and ask people which 'bucket' they would put each card in. For example, do you want to store all documentation related to a specific product in one section (e.g. MyJiraApp/Test Plans) or do you want to store it by what it is (e.g. Test Plans/MyJiraApp) ? It's good to know where people would naturally look before you decide where to put it.

2. Tree sorting - sort of the same thing in reverse. Take a screenshot of your page (i.e. left panel in Confluence) and ask people where they would look. So, for example, if someone took a screenshot of this page, and asked me where I would look for information on Confluence, I would answer that first I would click on Products.

[Kevin Dow]

Hi, @Joanna Weber , and thanks for your quick response.

Yes and yes.

I'm just starting my search through Community pages here to get a sense for what approached people are using. Yours is some very good advice on how to approach this from a user POV. I'll do some interviews with my teammates and see where they would naturally look for information. Thanks again.

[Caro Rayner]

I like using Whiteboard to make user stories & use cases because it's easy to link them to Epics in Jira. That way, you have the best possible way to decompose for visual thinkers who are left utterly cold by staring at product backlogs

[Kevin Dow]

That's quite good, Caro. Thank you. I hadn't thought about varying my layouts to accommodate different information consumption types. Helpful!

[Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc]

Hi @Kevin Dow , 

Thank you for posting this discussion, as we can learn from the great insights shared by other members in the thread!

Based on my experience working with numerous Confluence implementations, I wrote this article to highlight the best things I've learned in using Confluence for project management: A-Z guide to project management using Confluence - especially in using a combination of page properties macro and Confluence databases to build a project directory. 

I'd love to discuss more if you have any questions :D 

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Hi @Kevin Dow,

Little late to the party, but I can't escape talking about my favorite and most used tool.

I've used Confluence for almost any type of project, from product to marketing to customer onboarding and event experience. I am currently involved in building a new sales playbook project from scratch in Confluence. 

A few important items and resources you can easily utilize are:

• Get some initial feedback as early as possible. Even before creating the project draft and layouts, gather your team and discuss together the type of content you need and its look and feel. Structuring your Space is one of the crucial first steps when kicking off a new project. ( In this article, I scratched the surface of 'creating a new space' )
• Utilize pre-built templates, they are here for good. I have another article only focused on templates, and I believe they are very helpful when setting up a new project communication in Confluence. You have more than 120 templates you can load and start using asap.
• Use macros but use them wisely. Macros like Table of Contents, Page Tree, Epand, Include Page are crucial for long and complex pages, and they are very helpful for your contents' structure and flow.
• Here you can see some examples and screenshots from different project pages we've built in the past :) 

I hope this will be helpful for you!