Are your project management tools promoting collaboration or friction?

In today’s fast-paced work environment, having numerous purpose-built tools at our disposal should make collaboration easier. Yet, for many teams, advancing work feels more challenging than ever. Teams are bogged down in status meetings, or endlessly searching for information across tools, which leaves little time for high-value work and results in drained, disengaged employees who struggle to meet their goals. Leadership faces frustration due to a lack of insight into ongoing projects, making it difficult to make informed decisions and meet targets. With all the technology available to organizations today, it begs the question –  why are so many teams struggling to collaborate effectively? 

The root of these challenges often lies in the proliferation of project management and collaboration tools. Each tool, designed to address specific departmental needs, has led to a fragmented ecosystem. Today, 86% of organizations have more than 6 different tools in this category, double the number from 5 years ago. With each area of the organization choosing to standardize on different tools that weren’t designed to work together, this disjointed approach to tooling undermines the promise of effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment of each individual tool. 

Disconnected tools cause (quite a few) issues for teams

This problem of tool friction leads to real problems for the business. Gartner reports that organizations with a high amount of collaboration drag are 37% less likely to meet revenue goals. The hidden costs to the business results from delayed time to value due to lost time in unnecessary meetings and loss of productivity from constant context and tool switching. This leads to further hidden costs from employee disengagement and burnout. These issues stem from a lack of effective collaboration between teams, misalignment across teams and departments, and insufficient visibility among teams and leaders because of the disparate tools that fragment how teams operate and where work lives. 

Disconnected collaboration and inefficient execution

Effective collaboration is essential to success, yet the current disjointed tooling creates barriers to its implementation. Teams often lack access to each others’ tools, creating walls that block teams from collaborating together and obscure progress. With 56% of knowledge workers reporting that their teams track work differently, information becomes scattered, creating fragmented workflows and communication challenges.

Disconnected tools not only create barriers but also foster an environment where teams feel isolated. This isolation can lead to a lack of shared understanding and a decrease in innovative problem-solving. When teams can’t easily share insights or updates, they miss opportunities to leverage collective knowledge, which is essential for driving projects forward efficiently.

Misalignment with organizational goals

Disconnected tools lead to disconnected work, making it difficult to drive progress on key initiatives. Without a unified source of truth, teams struggle to align their work with organizational goals. Leadership’s strategic objectives often fail to translate into actionable plans, resulting in disjointed efforts that don’t advance priorities. In fact, 92% of teams report their projects are not well-aligned with their company strategies.

This misalignment can have cascading effects throughout an organization. When teams are not aligned with overarching goals, resources may be misallocated, and efforts duplicated, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Moreover, without clear alignment, teams may prioritize tasks that do not contribute to the organization’s strategic objectives, further exacerbating the disconnect between daily operations and long-term goals.

Lack of visibility

Disconnected tools provide only partial views of work, complicating the ability to see the bigger picture. Leaders need real-time data to make strategic decisions and get ahead of risks and blockers, but fragmented tech stacks obscure this information. This lack of visibility leads to duplicated efforts and coordination challenges, affecting morale and slowing time to market.

Visibility is not just about seeing what is happening; it’s about understanding the context and implications of ongoing work. Without comprehensive visibility, leaders and teams are left to rely on assumptions, which can lead to misguided strategies and missed deadlines. Furthermore, the lack of visibility can create a reactive rather than proactive work environment, where teams are constantly putting out fires instead of strategically planning for the future.

Help teams thrive with a unified platform

If you are experiencing any of these challenges with collaboration, visibility, and alignment, it’s time to reassess your tooling strategy to drive better business outcomes. Current “walled” applications that pop up in many organizations create barriers between teams that cause friction and frustration. A connected platform for project management can provide a shared space where all teams, departments, and leaders have the end-to-end visibility into the state of work across the organization to better plan and execute. Teams can stay connected to their goals, stakeholders, and day-to-day tasks while also having the flexibility to create workflows, projects, and automations adopted to their way of working. 

By aligning on a connected platform, teams benefit from:

• Effective collaboration: Communication is streamlined across departments through a shared digital workspace.
• Easy access to information: Teams can find and share work and documents easily across departments and projects.
• Automated workflows: Repetitive tasks are automated to boost productivity across teams.
• Goal alignment: Projects and tasks are connected to support overall business objectives.
• Real-time visibility: Leaders can quickly identify bottlenecks and gain insights into how a team’s work is progressing. 

If you want to provide these benefits for your teams (and of course you do!), it’s time to align on a unified platform. Currently, 39% of organizations have already consolidated their collaboration and communication tools into a single platform and another 46% are actively evaluating options to do so.  By unifying all teams on one connected platform, organizations can ensure teams have access to the information they need, can track projects across teams while working autonomously, and are aligned to goals to provide leadership insights into the status of work. 

Fix collaboration friction with Atlassian

Jira is the only project management solution that can empower all teams – from business to tech– to collaboratively plan and track work together across the organization with greater coordination, visibility, and insights. Jira is powered by the Atlassian platform with automations, analytics, and intelligence and its cross-functional capabilities are further enhanced with the native integration with Confluence for content collaboration and knowledge management. Loom adds additional benefits for asynchronous video collaboration among remote and distributed teams. 

With Jira, teams can have access to a common workspace where project, goals, and context are all openly linked together and visible across all teams and departments. Dashboards can report work and project statuses, providing real-time insights to help leaders and teams inform their decisions. Organizational goals are clear and linked to projects so teams know how their projects impact the company’s results. Jira provides the visibility, insights, automations and custom features that makes it the ideal shared project management solution across all departments.

Adopting Atlassian’s unified approach to project management offers significant advantages for organizations. By consolidating tools and reducing administrative overhead, companies can achieve up to 36% savings in tooling costs. This streamlined approach not only enhances efficiency but also boosts project success rates by 31% and shortens project durations by 25%. Furthermore, employees benefit from a more cohesive work environment, reporting a 50% reduction in time spent searching for information and a 10% decrease in turnover rates. These improvements collectively contribute to substantial time and cost savings, fostering organizational growth and delivering impactful business results.

One such organization who found success by standardizing their project collaborations on Atlassian is Reddit. By trading in their disparate tools for a central platform with Jira and Confluence, Reddit saved more than $300,000 annually and enhanced visibility, productivity, and project alignment across the organization.

Removing the silos that are created by the proliferation of tools being adopted across an organization is key to improving business outcomes. Using a unified project management solution like Jira – complemented by Confluence and Loom – across your entire organization helps reduce organizational inefficiencies and allows your teams to communicate, collaborate, and plan more effectively. 

Ready to make the switch and unlock the full power of your team’s collaboration? Learn more about Atlassian’s unified approach to project management.