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For over a decade, Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence have been supporting millions of teams and businesses around the world to improve software development, project management, collaboration and code quality. 

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From our LinkedIn posts and our Atlassian Silver Solution Partner status (we’re one of only two certified Atlassian Partners in Perth), you might have already gathered that we at Interfuze also use these two digital tools to deliver both projects and embed great practices for our team and clients. 

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One of the many (and sometimes unknown benefits) of Atlassian’s Jira, Jira Service Desk or Jira Management Services and Confluence tools is its ability to be used for more than just face value - i.e. for more than just project and issue tracking and document collaboration respectively. 

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Internally, we’ve set up Jira as a CRM, a workflow to review and approve financial models whilst we’ve configured Confluence to act as our intranet! 

Jira for scrum teams 

We recently worked with Arc Infrastructure to move their technology team from Excel and Waterfall software development methodology to Agile Scrum and used Jira as a digital supporting tool. 

Jira’s flexibility allowed us to create customised dashboards for leads and stakeholders and provide project portfolio overview as well as the actual projects.

These Jira dashboards helped Arc’s technology team to focus on projects that delivered business value and to have realistic delivery dates. 

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The dashboards also provided visibility on all Technology projects to the rest of the company, helping to elevate the team’s brand and important role within the organisation.  

Get creative with Jira 

Whilst Jira is well known for supporting agile software development, it is flexible enough to do whatever workflow your team requires. Here are some ways to get creative with Jira:

• Jira for CRM
  You can utilise issues as user profiles (as you would in a CRM), and create custom fields to display various metadata within that issue (profile). As mentioned previously, here at Interfuze we use Jira to create our stakeholder and lead CRM.
  
  

            Dashboards

          Example person in CRM

• Jira Service Desk
  Atlassian offers Jira as Service Desk platform that any team - software, marketing, sales or IT help desk - can use to allow stakeholders, clients and customers to easily submit a ticket. You can then set up a workflow that uses best practices out of the box or adapt your service management processes to match the way your team works. This Atlassian Service Desk is now referred to as Jira Service Management. As Jira experts in Perth, we at Interfuze are excited to be supporting businesses with this enterprise software.

• Jira for Marketing Projects
  Here at Interfuze we also use Jira for tracking marketing work and deadlines. By setting up customised workflows in Jira, marketing teams can have visibility and the ability to bring everything together and track the work that needs done, who's responsible, and when it's due by. Social media scheduling, content and PR and services marketing are just some of the Jira for marketing we use internally. 

• Jira for Reporting
  Jira offers exceptional reporting capabilities that are detailed, yet simple to understand and use. Jira’s standard reporting system covers everything you’d expect from a project management platform such as:

•        Created vs. completed tasks
•        User workloads
•        Task conclusion times
•        Time since issues
•        Average age of issues

Leveraging Confluence for better business 

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Historically, Confluence has been widely used by software teams to assemble ideas, product requirements and documentation to build better products. Confluence is designed to enable easy content updates with strong audit tracking and ability to switch back to previous versions i.e. give your team complete freedom to edit and update information, meaning it’s far more likely to be correct and complete, knowing you can trace who made changes. It has lots of macros to make generating useful content very quick to do.

It has a long history as an enterprise wiki / content collaboration tool in this way. In software development, we’ve used Confluence in Perth for structuring product requirements, sprint planning meetings and retrospectives using pre-built or custom page templates. 

Then users (we put our hands up for this too) came up with ways of leveraging Confluence for other use cases to take advantage of using one platform for  many purposes, including:

• Confluence for Intranet
  We’ve built our team’s intranet with Confluence. By creating a space, adding pages for information, a company logo, using the blog functionality for latest news and inviting team members, Confluence has provided an easy to create and manage intranet.
  
  
• Confluence for company websites
  In the same way that you can create an intranet using Confluence, you can do the same with your company website, saving resources on hosting, website design and development by using existing templates and easy to use interface.
  
  
• Confluence for project documentation
  Confluence is a great tool for recording a source of truth, meeting notes, and supporting documents for teams who might be managing a few projects at a time. You can create a space for each project and invite team members or even external clients to access all the information they need in one space. No more back and forth emailing!
  
  
• Confluence for many teams
  Confluence comes equipped with best-practice templates so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re a marketing team and need to create a marketing or content strategy, a creative agency brief, Confluence has that sorted. In Human Resources and need a career development plan or an induction booklet, yes Confluence also has those.

Get started or do more with Atlassian 

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As you can see, there’s so much that Atlassian tools - Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management - offer for software teams and other teams and businesses. If you are looking to explore the many potential cost and resource savings Atlassian can bring to your team and organisation, we’d love to help. Get in touch for an initial one hour free consult today.