My team lives and breathes in Jira. But, to tell the truth, I also know that Jira is not everybody’s sweetheart. Especially for newcomers. For some people, it takes time to warm up to Jira and until they do, the prospect of working in Jira may be terrifying. 

For project managers, this fact can be a time waster, because they are the go-betweens. They can’t afford to live in a Jira bubble and assume that executives will on a Jira link and get the information they need. They are the ones who make cross-functional collaboration work, so they require stakeholders to know what is happening.

The learning curve to efficient use of Jira is one siloing factor. The other elephant in the room is that Jira license costs add up. Many organizations allocate them to people who use Jira all the time. So, developers or IT will have them, HR team won’t.

Then how to remove the Jira silo?  

What you need is to share Jira information with stakeholders that are not on Jira. To achieve that, you can take one of these approached:

1. Status Meetings: this certainly is the traditional option. But why use them to review one by one every single Jira issue? It is a wasteful use of precious time together. Wouldn’t it be better to use meetings for problem-solving and brainstorming?
2. Export Jira data to Excel or other formats and share as files on a shared location. This is a common practice. 
3. If Confluence is your intranet, then Jira Snapshots for Confluence solves the problem.  With one click, it captures Jira data so that it can be shared with everyone with access to Confluence (even if they do not have a Jira license).

How to create stronger Jira and Confluence integration to break silos at work 

If Confluence is your internal public square, then project managers should use the Jira Confluence integration to their advantage. Confluence is where they share the project information that is useful to stakeholders. Sure – the development team has Jira – from the roadmap to the board to the velocity charts. All very useful tools when you are a developer, a scrum master or an IT support person. But if you are the executive interested in budget outcomes or a marketer waiting for a feature, you just want to see a succinct status for the issues that interest you. 

Confluence has a native feature that provides that: Jira Macro. It displays Jira data in Confluence pages. Alas, Jira issues are shown only to users who have Jira licenses.

So, how integrate Jira with Confluence to share Jira data with users who have no Jira license? Jira Snapshots for Confluence solves this problem (and some more). With this App, project managers can show non-Jira users exactly the issues and fields that are useful to share. The data is a static capture of Jira data at a moment in time. The snapshot app stores the data in Confluence. Hence, all Confluence users share exactly the same view.

The app has a few more sparkles, which make it a favorite for project managers:

• Snapshots can be configured to show Jira data in a hierarchy: Viewing Epics and their associated stories is always an eye-opener. It gives people a better idea about how far the Epic is.
• Excellent support for custom fields, including fields that are specific to Jira Service management. Yep- breaking silos at work also means breaking siloes with your JSM customers.
• What changed? Not only is each Snapshot a frozen capture at a point in time. You can compare how the data is today and how it was at any point in the past. No more arguments about how much progress was actually done.

How One Company Enhanced IT Onboarding and Increasing Internal Visibility

Sharing here a real life example.

A logistics company upgraded its internal IT operations to use Jira Service Management. Many of the other departments in the business did not use Jira at all. But everyone used Confluence. This separation meant that most people in the organization did not appreciate the strides that the IT team was making. The IT team was in their own silo, and others could not see through. It was time to dial up their Jira Confluence integration.

The IT Project Manager did just that by using Jira Snapshots for Confluence. Let’s take a closer look at one high-profile area: The IT onboarding process for new hires.

The IT onboarding process for new recruits involved these standard tasks: 

• sourcing a laptop, 
• setting up a user account in an Active Directory, 
• granting access to necessary tools and apps, 
• and conducting an onboarding/IT welcome chat. 
• Jira Automation is used to generate these tasks for each new hire.

The project manager wanted the HR team and managers to have visibility into the status of these onboarding tasks. She set up a Confluence blog page with a digest of current HR onboarding tickets. It would be updated twice a week and sent to all department heads and the HR team. She installed Jira Snapshots for Confluence and within 15 minutes the page was live. Now, departments are up-to-date on their new hires’ onboarding progress, without any added burden to the IT team.

Installing the app had great results as it reduced the follow-up communication from HR. This decreased context switching and ticket bouncing, leading to improved productivity. Both IT and HR teams benefited.

Furthermore, the regular updates were well-received by the department heads. They appreciated the concise format of the report, and it provided them with assurance that their new employee was being well taken care of.

The IT team now has a higher profile within the organization. It’s easier for them to promote their initiatives and get budgets.

Breaking Down Silos At Work is Good News For Everyone

Great work needs to be shared and celebrated. Well, and if not everything is rosy, it’s better not to hide, but rather control the message and keep everyone in the know early on. Good project managers know all too well that bad surprises are much worse than bad news. Bad news shared in a timely manner creates trust, and that’s the most precious commodity.

So visibility is important, and we know that not everyone is, or needs to be in Jira. Breaking silos at work doesn’t need to be difficult. If everyone uses Confluence, then use the Jira Confluence integration, save everyone’s time, and celebrate your team.

And if you’re interested in a Jira reporting solution to level up your work, check out this article: Breaking Down Silos at work with Jira Reporting.