Lesson. Learned.
“Way back when Vantresa and I first started working together, we were assigned a business process modeling/engineering effort. Vantresa was the systems engineer and project manager, and I was on the modeling team.
The customer had two Atlassian products available to our team: Jira, the ticketing system, and Confluence, which functioned like a wiki space. I personally had never seen these tools before and pretty much brushed them off as project management tools that had nothing to do with my modeling analysis responsibilities.
Vantresa had other plans. She used Jira to assign issues to all of us, with a clear expectation that we would keep the issues up to date.
For months, I never really logged into Jira. Nor did I post any of my work on Confluence. Vantresa bothered me EVERY DAY about logging my work. But, in my mind, these were “project management tools” that didn’t concern me. Besides, I provided daily updates to the team in our 10-minute “stand ups.” And I posted my work in a shared folder.
THEN… I got military orders for a 90-day deployment to support Hurricane Sandy. I was due to leave in less than a week.
I quickly scrambled to hand off work to the modelers and developers who were stepping in. But without updates in Jira and Confluence, I couldn’t easily transition the work or communicate what needed to happen next. The best I could do was point to a bunch of spreadsheets and diagrams in a shared folder, and forward a bunch of emails… in no particular order. Clearly, this was not helpful to the team. And, the team was not pleased.
When I returned from leave, our team vowed that we would keep Jira tickets and our Confluence space up to date, so we would never again create such an unnecessary burden. Thanks to Vantresa for being persistent in getting me to learn and use these tools!
After this experience, Vantresa and I championed the use of Atlassian across teams, for effective collaboration and delivery. Today, we are a much better team than we were 10 years ago when I was a stubborn analyst. And we’re proud to partner with Atlassian to train and educate future users through sharing our experience. “
– Jen Luik, CEO, Decisions Oriented