Tips for promoting long-term team adoption.
As teams scale and become more distributed, natural barriers like geography, different work styles, and preferences for different tools are introduced into the system and hinder collaboration. This proliferation of tools exacerbates silos and can quickly become unsustainable for IT teams to manage. A shared, deliberately chosen set of collaboration tools can break down silos and be easier for IT to manage.
Atlassian enterprise solutions offer just that. While we’ve been especially successful at supporting technical teams, our best practices can be adopted across every department within an organization to improve cross-functional collaboration and deliver solutions faster, with more predictability. Customers that have chosen to standardize on our toolset are able to build a foundation for collaboration, increase org-wide visibility, and reduce the administrative overhead and security vulnerabilities created by a proliferation of tools.
But promoting standardization can be difficult – it requires a cultural shift within an organization to ensure teams are bought to a shared vision and toolset. In our experience, organizations that build a strategic adoption plan are those that most successfully execute the rollout of Atlassian solutions. To help you on your adoption journey, we’ve compiled three tips from customers that have seen success from standardizing on the Atlassian toolset.
1. Build your community
One of the most important steps of any project is assembling the right team and the same is true here. Focus on finding individuals – we call them champions – across the organization that can help you understand the needs of their teams. Champions will help you build a bridge from how they’re working today to how you want your organization working in the future, collaboratively using the same toolset. Once you’ve built this community, you’ll want to create a strategy for ongoing engagement to ensure you maintain an effective feedback loop across different departments and course-correct your approach when necessary. As your community continues to build credibility and amplify the benefits of standardization, more and more teams will begin to come to you for ways to improve their workflows.
Customer spotlight: Air France-KLM
“Other teams often come to us asking to upgrade [to Atlassian] because they see how it could improve their life and deliver a better experience for the end-user.” Now, groups like HR and Marketing use Confluence to organize and document their work, and the Digital Content team uses Jira to track copy requests for the company blog. “Atlassian has changed the way teams work and evolve,” Product Owner Corné den Hollander explains. “It has especially helped the teams that are still growing their technical maturity.”
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2. Speak a common language
When it comes to persuading others to adopt a shared vision for collaboration, highlighting wins from across the organization will be key to your success. Often, teams within an enterprise organization have heard of Atlassian tools and know they’re popular with their technical teams. What’s lacking is an understanding of how these tools can be beneficial to departments outside of those teams. Use your champions to help business teams understand that, more often than not, workflows are consistent across each team. Take development and marketing, for example:
| Development |
| Plan → Create → QE → Fix → Commit |
| Marketing |
| Plan → Create → Review → Update → Publish |
While the words in each workflow look different, the actions behind them are the same. Both departments plan their work, create content, have it reviewed, and make fixes when needed, before publishing it to the world. By repositioning products that were once just for technical teams, you can help nontechnical teams see how these products can also deliver value for them.
Customer spotlight: Rockwell Automation
“Although initially intended for Engineering teams only, Jira and Confluence are now used throughout Rockwell. IT uses Jira to plan and execute hundreds of IT-related projects, HR uses it as a task-tracking mechanism, and we have just started working with our manufacturing support teams because there is a lot of interest.” – Jim Tompkins, Program Manager
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3. Deliver real solutions
No matter where you start your rollout process, the best way to increase adoption is by identifying a challenge another team is currently facing and solve it using an Atlassian product. Are new hires struggling to understand company policies and where to find resources? HR can use Confluence to create a knowledge base with centralized company policies and resources that new hires can access whenever they need. Do teams submit requests to legal but are unclear when they’ll get a response or where it is in the queue? Use Jira Service Management to provide visibility into where each request is, who’s been assigned to it, and when to expect an update. At Redfin, they’ve transformed their own practices and platforms with the help of Atlassian to redefine the real estate industry:
Customer Spotlight: Redfin
“Before, there wasn’t a unified place to get anything. We couldn’t really track where the work was, especially when people who are not in engineering are involved,” explains Director of Engineering Evan Lerer. “At a certain point, we needed a different level of communication and sharing and a better way to manage big, cross-team projects….We needed a centralized workflow to enable that, and none of the tools we had could do it.”
“Confluence is our linchpin for everything,” Evan says. “On their first day of work, new hires who are onboarding go to Confluence and start reading. ‘How do I set up my dev box?’ ‘How do I get my work going?’ Whatever they want to know, it’s all there.”
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Solving org-wide challenges like onboarding not only provides value to HR but ingrains the use of Atlassian products across every new hire that joins the entire company. These new hires are well-positioned to build trust and amplify the success they’ve seen through adopting Atlassian software to whatever team they join.
The path to adoption is not easy, but focusing on the people and processes in addition to the technology is the fastest way to success. To get a step-by-step guide to adoption, check out our Adoption Toolkit.