According to Atlassian’s recent State of Teams report, Fortune 500 leaders observe 25,000,000,000 (yes, billion) work hours lost per year due to ineffective collaboration.
We’ve learned that the most successful companies are able to efficiently collaborate beyond the bounds of specific functional walls. Additionally, they can harness tools like data and AI more effectively than their competition.
Introducing: Atlassian’s System of Work
Developed from supporting teams and over 20 years of teamwork research, Atlassian’s System of Work is a philosophy focused on bringing technology and business teams together to maximize team impact and collaboration so that organizations are equipped to improve productivity and innovation.
Atlassian’s massive investment in the Cloud platform over the last few years enables us to leverage the latest technologies to power these practices. As a result of the investments we’ve made for our customers, we have seen strong outcomes in the cloud, like collaboration, efficiency, and productivity, by leveraging the System of Work.
Teams need context to get to work, from roles and responsibilities to project goals and objectives and beyond. However, getting teams up to speed with the right context is historically a massive time sink across enterprises.
Through Atlassian’s System of Work, leaders can accelerate understanding across teams to strengthen their way of working, share knowledge, and align teams on goals across the organization.
Principles for effective teamwork
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We find that the most successful technology-driven organizations ensure that both their technical and business teams work together strategically and efficiently. Atlassian’s System of Work unlocks cross-team collaboration and drives impact by:
- Aligning work to goals
- Planning and tracking work across all teams
- Harnessing collective knowledge
Putting principles into practice
Bringing the System of Work to life through the Atlassian portfolio starts with building a foundation for teamwork across your organization. By enabling Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo across your entire organization, you can find alignment, make progress together, and unleash knowledge.
By leveraging Atlassian’s System of Work, teams methodically address the challenges of aligning teams, tracking work, and consolidating knowledge while developing foundational learnings to approach future issues.
Align work to goals
Aligning work to company-wide goals is a fundamental aspect of Atlassian’s System of Work. This approach ensures that every task and project is directly connected to strategic objectives.
Our research found that only 13% of executives report their teams have complete visibility into each other’s priorities and progress made toward those milestones.
Atlassian Goals plays a pivotal role in alignment and visibility by providing a centralized platform where teams can set, track, and achieve their goals. With Goals, teams can clearly visualize how individual and collective efforts contribute to broader organizational objectives.
This transparency fosters accountability and informed decision-making, empowers teams to prioritize effectively, and keeps them aligned with the company’s mission.
Plan and track work, together
Create a plan of action in Jira with the assistance of Rovo to transform Confluence and Confluence whiteboard contributions into a Jira plan with the next steps and assigned tasks.
Jira gives teams visibility into task dependencies, which show you the order in which steps need to be addressed. If there’s a dependency between two tasks, one must be completed before the next can begin. Teams can use this information to better sequence their work and anticipate if timelines need to be readjusted.
In addition to drafting a project plan, Rovo can also help teams prepare to launch it. For example, if your marketing team needs help drafting emails or social media posts, Rovo can generate that content and even modify the messaging and tone to best suit the situation.
With the help of AI, leaders can trust their teams are focused on more strategic, impactful parts of their role critical to business priorities.
Unleash collective knowledge
Confluence, Whiteboards, and Loom help to create a robust framework that breaks down silos and fosters a culture of open collaboration where knowledge flows seamlessly across teams and tools.
Unleashing collective knowledge is about creating a dynamic ecosystem where ideas can be shared, refined, and acted upon efficiently.
With Confluence, teams can document, share, and access information in a centralized hub. By supplementing traditional meetings with Confluence pages, teams can ensure that knowledge is captured and accessible to everyone, anytime.
Whiteboards provides a space for brainstorming and capturing ideas in a visual format. Once ideas are fleshed out, they can be seamlessly integrated into Confluence pages, ensuring that all insights are part of the organization’s collective knowledge base.
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Loom facilitates asynchronous communication. Teams can record Loom videos to share updates, presentations, or feedback, allowing for flexible and efficient knowledge sharing. This is particularly valuable in distributed work environments, where real-time meetings may not always be feasible.
With these tools available to your team, they can continuously improve their problem-solving and collaboration processes.
The Atlassian Cloud Platform and the System of Work
Atlassian’s portfolio brings our System of Work philosophy to life by uniting technology and business teams. Together, they can find opportunities and confidently weather challenges to deliver better products to your customers.
So, how does the Atlassian Cloud Platform power our portfolio?
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Experiences
Unifying applications and integrations, Experiences is the foundational platform layer that connects individuals and teams to the larger organization, providing the shared context necessary for collaboration.
This ecosystem of applications spans every key experience, from Rovo to data visualization, automation, and search. By layering applications that enhance platform features such as AI, automation, and integrations, the system becomes increasingly powerful for teams.
Teamwork Graph
The Teamwork Graph is the heart of our intelligent data layer, based on our 25 years of studying how teams and data interact. Most companies haven’t realized the full value of their data because it is challenging to clean and structure big data for proper analysis.
The Teamwork Graph explores the relationship between teams, the goals those teams pursue, the work they commit to, and the knowledge or data they share to get that work done. This is a highly opinionated view of these core objects that builds a common data model for both the teams and the tools themselves to communicate and stitch across experiences.
The Teamwork Graph leverages data from your DevOps toolchain, marketing-specific objects, IT workflows, and leadership planning tools to offer a bigger picture of how work flows across your enterprise.
This context is now more critical than ever due to the evolution of AI tools. Without this holistic data set, your AI capabilities will be far more limited. This sets Rovo apart from other AI tools since it pulls from context deeply relevant to your enterprise.
Enterprise Infrastructure
Finally, Atlassian’s Enterprise Infrastructure layer offers the foundation for all of this. An enterprise platform must meet certain non-negotiables, such as privacy, security, compliance, reliability, scale, and performance.
As a company that remains committed to helping scale enterprises during the rise of distributed work, Atlassian’s Enterprise Infrastructure layer is the unsung hero of both the Cloud Platform and the System of Work.
Adopt Atlassian’s System of Work today
Enterprises such as Riverty, AirFrance KLM, and Flo have already adopted the System of Work.
TIP
87% of Atlassian customers see work centralized with better visibility by using the System of Work.
Source: Internal platform ROI TechValidate survey, 2024. Survey responses were provided as part of a sweepstakes.
Atlassian makes it easier than ever to bring teams together. No matter your team or its function, Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo offer ways to ideate, plan, track, execute, and align. The easiest way to adopt the System of Work is to leverage the Atlassian Cloud platform to unify your data, get the most from AI, and keep all teams aligned on your overall strategy.
The learnings in this blog post are based on a session from Atlassian’s Team ‘24 Europe event. To learn more about Atlassian’s System of Work, check out highlights from this session. You can also watch all sessions on-demand to learn about the latest announcements and product innovations.