Why Does Your Team Need Jira and Confluence?

Should your company change its workflow when its standard approach consistently gets the job done? It’s a fact that people resist change. In today’s world, however, one of the most effective ways to gain a competitive edge is by embracing new technology.

Project Management Is Often Unorganized and Failure Is Accepted More Than It Should Be

One aspect of project based work that has always been unorganized is the project management component. It’s often messy to the point that many organizations have developed a high tolerance for failing to manage a project. During the execution phase of a project, forgetting tasks, extending due dates and cost overruns are a common occurrence.

Many of these issues occur so frequently that they are almost part of the entire process. It’s because of these occurrences that most teams struggle to even complete one-third of all projects on time and within budget. Some of the challenges that teams face includes cost, paper-based approval, and lost data (seriously its 2018 companies should be using resources more efficiently by now).

What a project manager needs to complete a project successfully on time and within budget is a way to track it from beginning to end (mind-blowing, right?). Moreover they also have to get the entire team to work towards the same goal in order to get more done within the allotted time and budget.

THE tool to use for pretty much everything has always been Excel, but it isn’t as efficient, not to mention it’s also outdated and has only limited features. Fortunately, I’m going to introduce two new tools that will become essential parts of your development toolkit. In addition to these tools making project management effortless, they will also help your developers with continuously making improvements that result in more efficient use of company resources.

Jira — A Development Tool to Keep The Team Agile

Jira is a software development and project management program created by Atlassian. In a nutshell, this tool is designed to make it extremely easy for your team to plan, track, and release projects. It has comprehensive features tackling every step of the development cycle, which means BETTER project management. By using Jira, you will be able to do the following (plus so much more):

· Plan — The team can create user stories, issue planned sprints, and distribute tasks between team members.

· Track — The software gives your team full visibility allowing everyone to discuss the full extent of the work and prioritize the most critical tasks in a collaborative fashion.

· Release — Feel confident during shipping knowing you always have up-to-date information.

· Report — The software helps your team improve performance through real-time, visual data that you and your team can put to good use.

Confluence — Software That Helps Ideas, Documents, and Projects Become a Reality, Made Better By Working Together

Confluence (also made by Atlassian) is software that your team can use for more streamlined file management and collaboration. This content collaboration tool is sure to change the way your team works. By using this tool, the ease of working collaboratively will increase exponentially as it will allow your team to create, share and collaborate in one place.

By having everything on one easy to use platform you can ensure that your projects are constantly moving forward towards completion. A useful feature of the tool is the fact that it is knowledge-based. Meaning, that everything you need for the project you can find in one place (kind of like your own personal wiki).

Confluence allows you to organize, publish, and access information efficiently in a central location in the cloud. It not only helps team members but your customers as well. Growing your team’s knowledge is also easy with the software through its various team documentation features.

There are way more features in both Jira and Confluence that I didn’t get a chance to touch on. But all of these features promise to increase the team’s productivity. Using these two tools will help the team eliminate many of the common challenges they may face when tackling a project. With the help of emerging project management tools like Jira and Confluence you can rest easy knowing that everyone on your team is working toward the same goal.