Pedro Rosa

Organising work is a daily topic for all companies. Who delegates what? How is that project that can’t really fail going? How do we evaluate the team’s workload?

All of these are legitimate questions, which is why we will help you take advantage of Atlassian tools to enhance your team and organisation. We will also present a use case, using the Xpand IT Marketing team as an example, so that you can better understand the true potential of these tools in teams outside the scope of software development.

Let’s start with Confluence. Regardless of the organisation’s area of activity this knowledge management and sharing platform allow teams to display projects in which they are involved, and share results, initiatives and even personal content that may be useful to the organisation.

Thanks to its structure we can almost call it an internal social network which allows information flows to run effectively, allowing all the people involved in the company to stay up to date on each other’s daily work.

Let’s look at the case of the Xpand IT marketing team. With access to Confluence, it is possible to get visibility over all the marketing initiatives (and not just marketing!) taking place in our company. Easy access to information makes all our employees feel involved about the same projects, increasing and fostering a teamwork culture. With Confluence, everyone has a voice and can share and give feedback.

For example, we can see the impact of Confluence in an interaction between the Marketing team and the Sales team. Even working on different levels, the platform allows both teams to give their inputs in support of Xpand IT’s participation in an external event.

Through the quick and easy editing of the event-dedicated page, it is possible to increase the agility of the entire organisational process and simplify bureaucratic work that could easily become time-consuming carried out over the usual email exchange.

This is just an example of the benefits that Confluence software can bring to your team. It is also important to understand that the platform requires some attention from your team because it can be easily forgotten and get out of date. In another article, we explore the 10 reasons to update your version of Confluence and make sure that everyone contributes to your team’s success.

Through Confluence it is also possible to create meeting notes, project plans and service specifications, among others. You can learn more about Confluence here.

The name may seem complex, but any issues ends there. This work management platform allows your teams to view all tasks to the current work period in a practical and intuitive way.

There are 4 phases linked to this platform’s success and which have a positive impact on teamwork:

– Plan: task distribution across the team;

– Track: task prioritisation and monitoring the success of each project where your team is involved;

– Release: execution time of various tasks. Throughout the work period, every team member can change their status to bring the rest of the team up to date;

– Report: at the end of each work period, it is possible to prepare a report that identifies where your team has been successful and the improvement points.

It’s based on these four phases that we can give you another example from the Xpand IT Marketing. Within a team there may be several work methodologies to be adopted (in this article you can read about 5 agile methodologies). For this case, we will explore the SCRUM method. This working method is characterised by cycles or stages of development, defined as sprints, and by the maximisation of time development for a series of tasks.

There should mainly be daily meetings of 15 minutes, the daily scrum, which act to synchronise activities and as a way to plan the working day. With 15-day work periods, called ‘sprints’, the team start their work cycle with a meeting where each team member uploads their tasks to the platform and assigns several metrics to them: story points (from 1 to 8), which help to understand the degree of difficulty of each task; hours, providing a more reliable count of the time to be spent on each task; priority, allowing the entire team to perceive the urgency of each project; and assignee, the person responsible for fulfilling it. It is also possible to create several labels using tags that allow a better visualisation of where the team spent their time, in the final report for each sprint.

Then, the SCRUM Master – the person responsible for the team – starts the sprint.

At the end of the sprint, the team meets again for another briefing to learn about areas for improvement in their working methods and task difficulties, amongst other things.

With this, as a team, we are able to understand the workload necessary for each project and consequently optimise the work and the effectiveness of the human resources allocated.