Learn how to use Jira and Confluence together to streamline planning and delivery.
At their core, modern program managers are responsible for providing visibility, keeping teams aligned, and ensuring those teams have what they need to deliver great work. Over the last few years, this role has rapidly evolved due to the needs of a distributed workforce. The way teams manage knowledge and communicate has expanded well past basic emails. These days, there are updates, timelines, communication over multiple apps, and more.
According to Atlassian’s State of Teams report, 56% of knowledge workers say that teams at their company plan and track work across different tools, siloing information and making it hard to collaborate. The same study found that 55% of knowledge workers have to spend extra time tracking down information, even with strong connections across their enterprise.
With the combined power of Jira and Confluence, program managers can elevate their processes of planning, organizing, tracking, and executing go-to-market programs while ensuring seamless connectivity across teams.
Start with Confluence to streamline planning phases
First, let’s explore how to create and collaborate while connecting your teams’ knowledge all in one place.
Organizations have many different ways of planning, but one thing that remains consistent is the starting point of an idea. With Confluence your teams can centralize the answers to big questions like “Where do we start?”, “Where do we assemble information?”, and “How do we bring these ideas to fruition?”
Confluence can reduce the chaos of tool sprawl and serve as a centralized connected workspace.
Starting with your idea is just the beginning. For most program managers the planning phases are as follows:
- Brainstorming – putting pen to paper
- Project collaboration – bringing others into the fold
- Knowledge sharing – offering context for buy-in
Turn ideas into action by brainstorming with Confluence whiteboards
Turn ideas into action with interactive stickies the whole team can participate in crafting and arranging. Confluence whiteboards can also streamline getting to work by harnessing the power of Atlassian Intelligence to read the board, group the stickies, and break down the ideas into actionable Jira steps. Whiteboards also offer other interactive illustrative abilities to ensure your teams are aligned on your best ideas.
Improve project collaboration by converting whiteboards into pages
When it’s time to build out the detailed project plan from your brainstorming session, you can transition your whiteboard into a Confluence page using 1 of 200 templates, or by customizing your own. Confluence offers a template tailored to the needs of program managers called the project plan template. With just a few modifications, this template helps project managers get on their way to collaborating on highly detailed plans with their stakeholders.
Use live edits and comments to improve collaboration across teams
Live editing is a dynamic, efficient, and collaborative way of creating and sharing pages in Confluence.
With live editing, teams can edit their pages in real-time together or asynchronously. Any changes made to your page are automatically saved and reflected to all viewers without needing to hit “Update.”
Knowledge sharing with AI
By using AI, program managers can make information easier to find, write, and consume. Atlassian Intelligence can help with brainstorming and planning by suggesting action items, plan titles, and page summaries so that team members can swiftly get up to speed on a project.
Knowledge sharing with Loom
Program managers can now record an asynchronous Loom video for the top of their Confluence page, offering greater context and summaries for what the stakeholders are about to read. This cuts the need for extraneous meetings and keeps teams in the flow.
Knowledge sharing with credibility
Update your Confluence page status to help set expectations with partners on whether your plan is still in draft, ready for review, or verified.
Setting your single source-of-truth page status to verified lets partners know your page is now the central knowledge base, adding critical context to efficiently move onto the next project phase.
Execute and deliver programs with Jira
Although it has a deep history in the engineering community, Jira is also great for non-technical program managers. Jira is now so user-friendly that it’s even widely used by Atlassian’s Marketing Team throughout all phases of execution, such as:
- Program setup and kickoff – break down work, confirm ownership, then set up tools and processes
- Execution and tracking – progress and updates, reviews and approvals, insights and improvements
- Planning for launch – alignment of timelines and launch activities
Now, let’s delve into how we can use Jira as a scalable, go-to solution to break down cross-functional work, gain visibility and insights, and keep teams aligned while being flexible about how our teams work best.
Kicking off with a team-managed business project setup
By taking the verified single source of truth in Confluence mentioned above, program managers can translate it into a new team-managed Jira business project with a relatively basic setup. To help drive clarity of ownership, program managers can create one epic per workstream and then assign it to an owner whose responsibility is to break down this work into more detailed tasks and deliverables.
Teams can adjust their project viewing preferences to suit their needs, whether that’s in the form of a list view, calendar view, or by organizing tasks according to type.
When to use a team-managed Jira project vs a company-managed Jira project
Team-managed projects
Team-managed projects are ideal for autonomous teams that want to control their own working processes and practices in a self-contained space. These projects can be set up and maintained by anyone on the team.
Team-managed projects have simpler project configurations and give project admins more control over setup without involving a Jira admin.
Choose a team-managed project if:
- Your team wants easier project configuration to get started quickly.
- You want a self-contained space to manage your team’s work.
Company-managed projects
Company-managed projects are the best choice for teams who want to work with other teams across many projects in a standard way, such as sharing a workflow. These projects are set up and maintained by Jira admins, and require admins to configure screens and schemes that projects are based on.
Company-managed projects have greater complexity in project configuration, but also the ability to standardize workflows across projects that team-managed projects don’t have. When a Jira admin changes a scheme or screen, every company-managed project that uses that configuration changes accordingly.
Choose a company-managed project if:
- You want to standardize configuration across multiple projects in your organization
- You want complex customization with regard to permissions and workflow.
Learn more about the differences between team-managed and company-managed projects.
Using custom issues to set up larger programs
For program managers working on larger programs, leveraging a deliverable-type issue can help differentiate between a task and a deliverable as the final output of work. Program managers can also create a risk issue type in their Jira project to track potential problems or uncertainties that could impact a project.
pro tip
Don’t customize issues too early out of the gates. Start with what you need–you can always add more later.
Quickly get teams working with the AI work breakdown
This game-changer of a feature will break down your epic into child tasks. Using Atlassian Intelligence, you can review suggested child tasks to best match your program’s needs without the time sink of manual planning and input.
Stay in lockstep with other teams by linking issues
With the linked issues feature in Jira, you can make sure your program is going to plan even when other teams’ tasks equate to dependencies for you. For different teams with different programs, having linked issues prevents teams from obstructing each other for faster delivery down the road.
Get ready to launch with the plans timeline view
With the plans timeline view, everyone can see what’s happening across teams to ensure that any situations with a dependency can be clearly communicated in advance or improved flexibility across your enterprise.
Plan for the long term with the program board feature
For an additional perspective, programs can be viewed as a board for a high-level glance at long-term plans. Drag-and-drop capabilities make it easy to quickly get started planning your next set of sprints or phases of work.
Streamline your programs with Jira X Confluence integrations
As a program manager, the tools you introduce to your team need to make work easier. Whether your teams prefer working in Jira over Confluence or vice versa, integrations across both tools mean users can continue to update partners without leaving their tool of choice.
Embed Jira boards into Confluence pages for quick references
Embed Jira plans in Confluence pages to keep the context of work and tasks all in one place. You can also see your Jira tasks in different views, whether you prefer lists or boards while continuing to work inside of your Confluence page.
Edit Confluence pages within Jira
Need program context from Confluence, but prefer working in Jira? Connect Confluence pages to Jira tasks, allowing you to make quick edits to both without having to change tools.
The best of both worlds for project management
Together, Jira and Confluence enhance the way program management teams accomplish tasks by centralizing information and streamlining collaboration. Watch our webinar to learn more about how Atlassian marketing teams use Jira and Confluence in tandem.
The learnings in this blog post are based on a session from Atlassian’s Team ’24 Europe event. Watch all sessions on-demand to learn the latest announcements and product innovations.