The recipe to keep your cross-functional teams on track and successfully execute your programs
If you’ve ever gone hunting for information, digging through Slack archives, Google Docs, and spreadsheets, then you’ve experienced the common challenges of cross-functional collaboration.
Program managers working in cross-functional teams end up spending 30% of their workday searching for information. And when you can’t find the right information, you can’t work together effectively. In fact, 70% of corporate errors are due to poor communication between teams.
But working in different departments doesn’t mean you’re doomed to get stuck in information silos that hinder your program launches. The solution is a centralized environment for sharing knowledge and executing tasks and initiatives. With Atlassian, you can integrate your single sources of truth for planning (Confluence) and execution (Jira).
Today, we’ll dive into how to use both of these collaboration tools to keep your cross-functional teams on track and successfully execute your programs.
Cross-functional collaboration: Plan with Confluence
During the planning stage, big-picture decision-making and problem-solving come into play. You need a place to get out all your ideas, create a plan, and refer back to these pages as needed. Confluence is where ideas come together, and it becomes a central source of knowledge for every stakeholder of a project.
As a hub for knowledge sharing, Confluence reduces chaos and helps you carry out three key planning phases as you work toward a common goal.
1. Brainstorming
One of the benefits of cross-functional collaboration is that you get to work with diverse teams. You can get input from team members with different skill sets and expertise, bringing unique ideas to the table. During the brainstorm phase, you need a place where you and your team can contribute their ideas and voice their opinions about key parts of the program.
With Confluence Whiteboards, you can visualize, categorize, and build off each other’s ideas. After iterating and revising, you’ll start piecing together the core parts of your project that will help you meet your collective team goals.
2. Building out the plan
In the next phase, create a more detailed project plan that you can share with all teams. Use one of Confluence’s many page templates to get started. This might vary depending on your specific project, but a good place to start is with the project plan template. Keep in mind that this is a living document where real-time editing allows different teams to keep working on the plan until it’s ready to ship.
P.S. New feature coming soon: Convert your whiteboard stickies directly into a Confluence page.
3. Knowledge sharing
Working cross-functionally also means being accountable to people who have different perspectives and working styles. Once you’ve laid out a plan in Confluence, it’s time to add more context that helps you get buy-in from stakeholders and create a shared understanding of the work ahead.
To address potential knowledge gaps and keep everyone on the same page, you’ll need to effectively capture every stakeholder’s attention. You can do this by:
- Adding a table of contents or TL;DR section at the top of the Confluence page to give a quick overview of the information.
- Using Atlassian’s AI to summarize the page for you and present the information in the voice and tone that would resonate most with the various departments involved.
- Recording an overview Loom video and embedding it at the top of the page.
- Adding a verified label to the Confluence page so that people know it’s the single source of truth for this project.
For example, say you need to share this page with your sales team. Share the Confluence page with your sales team, and make sure to include the verified label. This way, they know it’s the most up-to-date messaging. Plus, you can include a table of contents that they can use to jump to each section quickly.
Not only does this maintain alignment, it also gives everyone back the gift of time. When knowledge is easily accessible, you avoid meetings just to clarify or convey information.
Cross-functional collaboration: Execute with Jira
Now that you have a clear plan, you need a cross-team collaboration tool to execute it. That’s where Jira comes in.
Some people are under the impression that Jira is only for software teams or technical program managers. But Jira is actually flexible enough to keep teams aligned no matter what type of program you’re launching. Whether it’s a high-level view of a complex marketing campaign launch or a simple board to track your team’s daily tasks and milestones, you can customize it to fit your existing processes.
During the execution stage, there are a number of ways you can leverage Jira’s powerful features to streamline your work in each phase.
1. Setting up the program
In the first phase of the execution stage, use Jira to break down the work, confirm ownership of tasks, and set up processes to get the work done. To collaborate effectively, everyone needs to be on the same page about each of these key areas.
Start by setting up a framework of epic issues, high-level initiatives for bigger pieces of work, and categories for each epic in a Jira board. To drive clarity on ownership, create one epic per workstream and organize them into categories that can easily be filtered by group. Then, assign each epic to an owner who will be responsible for creating tasks and tracking their own team’s work.
If you’re working on a larger project, it’s especially helpful to create custom issues to keep track of things like risks and decisions. For example, a decision issue type enables you to easily maintain a decision log that you can refer to throughout the project from within Jira.
2. Scaling with complexity
As your project gets more complex, with timeline changes, scope creep, or dependencies on other teams, Jira can adapt and scale. Use Jira to share progress updates, provide feedback for improvement, and create new tasks on the fly.
To keep your cross-team collaboration running smoothly and give back the gift of time, use automation. For example, say your marketing program needs work from the design and web team. Each has a separate Jira service desk project. To save your team from having to raise two separate requests in the other systems, set up an automation so that when a label is added to a task, it triggers an issue creation in both projects.
You can also link those tickets to the original task so your marketing team can get a detailed view into the status of these dependencies without having to leave your Jira project.
3. Planning for launch
When you’re working with so many teams, planning for launch is all about maintaining high-level alignment on timelines and launch activities. Rather than switching between every team’s projects, you can create a plan for all the Jira projects in one timeline view. This way, you can see what’s happening for all other teams and vice versa.
To have a successful launch, it’s also crucial to be proactive around dependencies. Otherwise, you might be looking at wasted time, delays, and other blockers. While timeline view allows you to see how projects line up, dependency view increases visibility, enabling teams to see work by team, project, epic, and more. Here, you can discuss and resolve dependencies, which is especially important as you start lining up your activities for launch.
Plus, you can share both these plan views with leadership so they see a comprehensive view of the program.
Bridge every step with Atlassian’s cross-functional features
Using Confluence and Jira increases visibility, maintains alignment, and helps you deliver your programs. But effective cross-functional collaboration for a go-to-market program launch is about bridging every step of the work, including the tools at your disposal.
That’s why we made it possible to embed Jira views in Confluence and connect Confluence pages in Jira. And no matter which tool you’re working in, you can easily see and update information in the other. You can embed a Jira list view into your Confluence program kickoff page and make inline edits without ever leaving Confluence. Or link a Confluence page to epics and tasks directly inline without ever leaving Jira.
Using both tools together will help you truly streamline end-to-end project management. Learn more about Atlassian’s work management suite and start simplifying your cross-functional projects today.