Running a remote team? Here’s how Jira and Confluence can help

Remote or dispersed teams are on their way to becoming a new standard in the life of organizations. While technology makes it far easier to hire remote workforce for your business, knowing which tools your teams should be using is critical.

There are plenty of tasks remote teams find challenging, and you can be sure that there’s a tool that solves each of these problems. The trick is choosing the right combination of tools.

Here are some excellent reasons why equipping your remote team with Atlassian tools, Jira and Confluence, is a smart move.

1. Transparent progress tracking

Projects usually involve many people who perform entirely different tasks that contribute to its progress. As you can imagine, a dispersed team risks severe communication problems when team members aren’t sure which parts of tasks have been completed and which ones is still in progress.

By introducing a single space where all tasks are listed and their statuses visible, organizations can easily track the progress of their projects, assign different tasks to team members and adjust the timelines.

That’s where Jira comes in. It’s such a useful tool because it gives your team a place to track the progress of their daily tasks, make adjustments to estimates, and see what other team members are up to. That type of transparency is essential when managing remote teams. It helps team members to avoid losing time on contacting one another and to get an update about their respective tasks.

2. Smooth team management

When a project manager assigned tickets to a team member in Jira, that person will be notified through email. As they work on the task, they can add comments and mark their progress.

That way, the manager won’t have to reach out to that person every time they want to learn about the status of a particular task. All this data is available right away – and later aggregated into reports managers can use to track the progress of the entire project, no matter how complicated it is.

And the best thing about Jira is that it’s not only great for software development projects, but internal, marketing, or sales projects.

3. Single source of truth

When managing a dispersed team, it’s critical that all the information relevant to the project is kept in a single place and accessible to each team member, no matter where they are.

That’s where Confluence comes in handy. It’s an Atlassian tool that serves as a wiki platform, allowing organizations to promote knowledge sharing and make project requirements accessible to all stakeholders. Using Confluence, you can create pages, upload and share documents with your team and customize the platform further thanks to a variety of apps that address your team’s needs.

Its simple interface supports creating an internal documentation library for your team. You don’t want team members to waste time on emailing information back and forth – and risk making errors on the way. With Confluence, everything they need is available with just a few clicks.

4. Communication with clients

You can use Confluence for other purposes too. For example, you can build project areas and share them with clients to facilitate the communication of the project’s progress and allow your clients to add project-specific information that in the entire team needs.

Confluence helps to keep project data organized and facilitates the transfer of information between the team and clients, making it an excellent tool for dispersed teams.

5. Extra tip: Trello

Trello is an excellent tool for organizing work. You can set up a board for your project or have each of your team members set their own boards. As a team leader, all it takes is one look at the personal boards of your team members to see what they’re currently up to and what tasks they’ll be completing next.

Since tasks are organized in easy-to-read columns, the team member can drag-and-drop tasks around and show you at what stage they are at the moment.

This is critical if your team is dispersed around the world and there are significant time zone differences involved. You won’t have to wait several hours for them to respond to your email. You’ll have the information available in front of you, right away.

Key Takeaway

Picking the right tools is a surefire method for making remote team management easier. Dispersed teams that are supported with the right technologies are focused, productive, and efficient.

Have you got any questions about Jira and Confluence as tools for remote team management? Reach out to me at radoslaw.cichocki@deviniti.com; I help organizations pick the right technologies and solutions to solve their problems.

Radoslaw Cichocki

Radosław is a Capitan of a team implementing Atlassian tools focusing on ITSM and corporate-scale deployments. His knowledge is confirmed by ACP certificates in Jira Core, Software, and Service Management. He analyzes Deviniti clients’ requirements, provide consulting, craft visions of solutions, and mentor the implementing teams. Privately, he is a mountain hiking fancier and a big fan of guitar music, especially fingerstyle.

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