agile project management
Project management tips for big, hairy, complex projects
The most challenging part of conquering a complex project is simply starting. At Atlassian, we deal with complex projects every day, from cross-product integrations to projects with aggressive deadlines or dispersed teammates. The bigger and more dynamic a project is, the more likely it is to cause stress and indecision. Although every project is different, and […]
Keep everyone focused on what matters with the new Jira Cloud for Slack
By popular request, we’ve teamed up with Slack to make it easier for teams to stay in sync, focus on the task at hand, and get the right people on the job with the new Jira Cloud for Slack app. Multiple projects, an overabundance of information, and distributed team members can make teamwork difficult. The […]
How to manage projects like an actual project manager
So. You have to manage a project, and you’re not a project manager by trade. I’ve been there. It’s pretty daunting, with all these different frameworks and methodologies to consider… But if you’re like me, you don’t really care about methodology. You just want to deliver your project successfully, and not lose your mind in the process. […]
How to build a kick-ass agile team
Despite sharing common values, there is no formula for the perfect agile team. Some implement scrum while others use kanban. Agile purists prefer co-located teams, but business realities sometimes necessitate distributing an agile team across geographies. Most agile teams possess all the required skills, but sometimes it’s necessary to call on specialists for specific work. So how do you know whether your team is on the path to greatness? Read on.
5 ways to become a planning master with Portfolio for Jira
Even when your teams are agile, there’s still a need to plan ahead. However, it can be hard to balance the day-to-day of completing your team’s sprint with the added pressure of having to plan for what’s next. Knowing that Jira is the place where teams manage their everyday work, we’ve built Portfolio for Jira specifically […]
Ideas to optimize your planning poker sessions
This is a guest post by Vitalii Zurian, a software engineer and the creator of a series of agile add-ons for Jira Cloud, including the #1 paid add-on, Planning Poker. Vitalli blogs at agilevalues.com. As your team matures and becomes more experienced, you’d think your estimates and planning poker sessions would improve as well. Seems […]
Inside Atlassian: how we use Jira Core for HR Project Management
The HR team at Atlassian was using excel and email to manage their projects. That is, until the bright-eyed Jira Core team approached ’em with a proposition: Implement Jira Core for them to manage their HR projects if they told us everything about the experience. Boom! We had ourselves a deal. And it was good one, because HR use cases typically involve onboarding and recruiting… but HR teams do so much more than that. Read on to learn about the results of the proposition, how the Atlassian HR team now uses Jira Core for HR project management to be more organized and in the know for all tasks, requests, and statuses.
Try using mind maps to plan your next project
Mind maps are a great way for visual learners and thinkers to brainstorm ideas, plan out projects, and tap into the creativity of the team. Plus, they’re collaborative. You can work through ideas and problems together, going from initial ideas to formalized plan as a team. If you’ve felt frustrated at the start of a project, you gotta check out these 3 ways you can use mind maps in Confluence to go from concept to solid project plan.
Know thy customer: agile’s essential guide to user story maps
A story map is a visual representation of the journey a customer takes with a product, including activities and tasks they complete. Agile teams create the story map in a collaborative session to ensure they have a shared understanding of the customer and their desired outcomes. Today I’ll show you the basics of user story mapping and why it’s a worthwhile endeavour for your agile team.
3 ways to stay on top of your software project in Confluence
If your project in Jira Software is your one-stop shop for everything JIRA-related, then your project space in Confluence is your go-to place for everything else: requirements, retrospectives, meeting notes, and more. Here are 3 ways to use the project space to surface what’s most important to you.
Inside Atlassian: how we do marketing project management with Jira Core and Confluence
Marketing can be a cyclical process. We marketers typically plan projects, assign work, review content, publish, and then…. start all over again. At the beginning of each quarter, we approach this process with bright-eyed enthusiasm, big ideas, and a clear plan of attack. But as the months wear on, and more (or unexpected) work accumulates, it can […]
Agile roadmap planning done right with Jira Software and Portfolio for Jira
Agile software development supports a release plan, but it’s challenging to coordinate that on a multi-team level when you’ve got a lot of dependencies between teams. Rosetta Stone, a language learning technology company, found a solution to this challenge by bringing their entire development organization together about once per quarter to map out 10 to 12 weeks of work. And last week, I was lucky enough to watch how they do this at their 5th program increment planning (dubbed “PI5”). Here’s how it worked.
Kanplan: where your backlog meets kanban
There’s no silver bullet when it comes to picking an agile framework for your agile team. Whether you use kanban, scrum, or a combination of the two, like scrumban, agile is a team process. Every team needs to figure out which framework works best as a foundation for how to plan, track, and release great software.
Inside Atlassian: a product manager and a dev manager walk into a planning meeting…
Product planning meetings are one of the most important meetings in a product’s lifecycle so we decided to take you inside a product planning meeting at Atlassian by filming the latest Portfolio for Jira planning meeting (filming the planning meeting of a planning tool seemed only fitting). These product planning meetings tend to happen quarterly and last about four hours (don’t worry – we time-lapsed it for you of course!).
Break it down: decomposing user stories in Jira
With over 500k agile projects in Jira (among just Cloud customers – wow!), we realized we’re sitting on a ton of data that sheds light on how agile teams function. We then bet, that with some anonymized data mining, we could find teams that have a release cadence that they hit sprint after sprint after sprint.