Great projects come from great teams, working in collaboration
Think of the most successful, most satisfying project you’ve ever been a part of — whether it was a new product, a transformative innovation, a big initiative, a major launch, or something completely different.
Whatever it was, one undeniable truth remains: you didn’t do it alone. No one does it alone.
Great projects are the result of great teams and great teamwork. Common goals. Effective planning. Outstanding execution. Strong alignment.
You also know that great teams and teamwork are rare. Executing major initiatives is hard. Lack of alignment is common.
Barriers to cross-functional teamwork
Not only do major projects require effective teams, but they usually require cross-functional teams with talented, committed individuals from various disciplines.
A typical cross-functional team might include a product leader, someone from engineering, and a designer, along with representatives from sales, marketing, and other functions, depending on the industry.
It is common for each function to operate within their own silo, with distinct goals, data, tools, and cultures
Such differences can result in miscommunications, friction, frustration, missed timelines, and difficulty executing projects that will move the needle in the organization.
Most of us who have worked on successful cross-functional teams have also worked at some point on a dysfunctional team, or on a well-intentioned team that simply wasn’t operating to its full potential. We knew that the barriers that impeded the ability of the team to work together effectively were holding back the team and the entire organization.
Atlassian’s outlook
Atlassian knows that great teamwork is built on shared goals, coordinated work, and the free flow of information across teams
As Atlassian looks to the future, we are consumed by a new vision for helping organizations unleash the full potential of each team’s efforts by building tools that help teams do their absolute best work. We call it the Atlassian system of work.
Enabling better teamwork and collaboration
Atlassian has multiple tools, like Confluence and Jira, to help cross-functional teams throughout an organization come together. The results are stronger connections among teams and better products, services, and solutions for customers.
Atlassian’s tools support more effective collaboration throughout the entire lifecycle — from ideation, to planning and tracking, to execution, and encompass alignment.
Ideate
Successful projects start with great ideas, and great ideas often begin with brainstorming and whiteboarding sessions. But, while such sessions can produce great ideas, they are often chaotic and disorganized. Who captures the ideas or notes on the whiteboard? Who follows up? What are the next steps?
Atlassian is taking brainstorming to the next level, with AI-powered whiteboards in Confluence, powered by Atlassian Intelligence.
When using AI-powered whiteboards, cross-functional teams don’t need to start their brainstorming from scratch. Atlassian Intelligence can pull together information from multiple sources — customer feedback in Jira Product Discovery, customer call notes in Confluence, customer support conversations in Jira Service Management. This information jumpstarts the brainstorming process.
As brainstorming is occurring, Atlassian Intelligence can sort ideas and group together related content, so participants can see themes and trends. AI-powered whiteboards are next-generation brainstorming.
Then, when teams want to turn their best ideas into action, Atlassian can help. New Integrations in Jira and Confluence will pull content directly from the whiteboard, enable voting, map relationships and dependencies, and assign tasks to the right members. Integrations helps cross-functional teams turn ideas into work.
Big ideas start with Jira
A major evolution at Atlassian, to better enable cross-functional teams to work together, is combining the best of Jira Work Management (list, calendars, inline editing, color) and Jira Software into Jira — the only project management solution that organizations will ever need.
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Plan & track
Once projects are initiated, planning and tracking as a cross-functional team is critical. Atlassian is introducing or enhancing several products to help teams work more closely together in planning and tracking projects.
One enhancement is Lists in Jira. With Lists, team members can easily see all work items in a familiar, powerful view. Tasks can be assigned and pinned with context and the details behind the work item. And boards can be organized by nesting subtasks or epics. Also, work can be grouped with filters. Lists will be a gamechanger for viewing, organizing, and managing a team’s work across any project.
Another tool to improve planning and tracking is Shared release dates in Jira. This enables teams to keep track of work items in their calendar view.
In addition, new AI features — like AI Work Breakdown and AI Editor — will help teams take the knowledge and data in Jira and recommend better ways to plan and track work. With AI Work Breakdown, the AI recommends subtasks and breaks work down into small, achievable sub-tasks.
The bottom line: Atlassian is transforming Jira to make cross-functional collaboration easier.
Roblox
Roblox is the fastest growing gaming platform in the US, played by half of all kids under age 16, with 67 million daily active users. The company has experienced rapid growth at massive scale. As the company has grown, it cannot afford team miscommunications or duplicative work.
To improve collaboration and team work, Roblox moved the entire company onto Confluence and Jira, which completely changed how teams related to one another.
Jira and Confluence make life easier. People can spend more time working on the value add, not busywork.
Mike Rathwell, Modus Create, Roblox Atlassian Partner
Execute
There are multiple hurdles that make it difficult for teams to execute and deliver projects. Team members work in different geographies, in different time zones, using different applications. On average, enterprises have 291 applications. These differences make it hard to organize workstreams and business processes.
Also hindering execution is that team members must spend so much time — up to 40% — searching for the information they need to do their job.
To improve execution, Atlassian provides new ways for teams to communicate efficiently, discover the information they need, and eliminate time-consuming tasks.
Loom is an exciting tool for improving cross-functional execution. With Loom, a team member can easily create, edit, and share a video, as a way of communicating with other team members. Loom drives better async communication, reduces ineffective meetings, and makes people feel more efficient and connected.
Other improvements Atlassian is making to help teams connect better include:
- Smart Links in Content Tree (in Confluence)
- Unified Search (in Confluence)
- AI summaries (in Jira and Confluence)
Align
Aligned teams are less likely to face derailments and more likely to succeed. Atlassian saw the opportunity to create a better way for team leaders to get updates and keep projects on track.
A great way for teams to stay aligned is use of Goals in Jira. Deep integration of Goals into Jira makes it easier for teams to plan, track, and share goals with colleagues. For example, a marketing lead can see goals for her team’s work and can connect individual tasks to the overall outcome of the work. She can follow a goal to receive weekly updates or filter down to see what a team is working on. Goals work across both projects and teams. Since work is tracked in one place Jira provides program-level visibility and context.
Another improvement is making Plans available in Jira, providing a big-picture view of every project. Managers can use the summary view in Plans to get an overview of all goals associated with a program, and see what tracking and team capacity looks like.
A further way to improve alignment is to share news with the entire organization, using Company Hub in Confluence. Company Hub makes it easy to create a customizable, engaging single source of truth for what’s happening across the organization.
With Jira and Confluence, it’s never been so easy to align the entire organization.
At Reddit, lots of different teams were using multiple disparate products. By moving to Atlassian products, Reddit teams could all work together in one platform, which enabled streamlining workflows. The best part of having teams work together in Jira and Confluence is the massive time savings for individuals and teams.
Taking collaboration to the next level
As the nature of work evolves, Atlassian recognizes the need to improve the tools and technologies that organizations use to get work done.
That’s why all of Atlassian’s new features and product enhancements — particularly the ambitious changes in Jira and Confluence — are driven by one clear, unifying goal: enhancing cross-functional teamwork by building collaboration directly into the workflow.
Great teams want and need to collaborate. Atlassian makes it easier than ever to bring teams together. No matter your team or its function, Jira and Confluence offer ways to ideate, plan and track, execute, and align. The ultimate result will be more successful projects and greater value for customers.
Learn more about how Atlassian is bringing teams together in an on-demand Team ’24 session!