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Enterprise Gaming Company Optimizes Confluence for Scaleable Growth

January 31, 2019

Overview

One of the most well-known makers of hobby gaming systems, whose leading product nets around $250 million annually, needed help managing requirements and project planning in their existing Confluence instance. While the company is at the top of their industry, they recognized the value in establishing standardized requirements gathering, paired with a more structured project planning hierarchy in Jira Software. As committed Atlassian users, they sought us out as world-leading Experts with a specialty in business process consulting. By customizing and configuring our client's project layout and organization of requirements in Confluence, we delivered optimized processes that scale as the company grows, continuing to provide value to increase their release cadence and keep their many fans happy.

THE CHALLENGE

Prior to our engagement, our client's primary method of project planning- from requirements in Confluence to planning and tracking in Jira- were disconnected and didn't provide the efficiency and results they'd wanted. With a new team joining, our client made the decision to gain our expert insights into how they could optimize their requirements management for imminent, scalable growth. The solution needed to meet their teams' needs for years to come- and it needed to happen quickly!

THE SOLUTION

With expertise in Atlassian, as well as the Agile methodology, our resources teamed with client subject matter experts and stakeholders to customize a requirement management solution that fit their exact needs. By configuring Confluence and Jira Software based on our own requirements gathering with the client, we provided the product value and processes needed to manage requirements and project planning through the Agile methodology on a department-wide level. Additionally, by tailoring the Atlassian products for our client's specific use case needs, enthusiast adoption of the tools and processes has led our client to already see results in their happier, more productive teams.

TEMPLATES FOR STANDARDIZATION

Using customized templates and blueprints for Confluence, our client gains the ability to standardize requirements gathering across their organization. With identified fields for required data and information, collaborators are able to easily organize and define their requirements and express needs for the projects at hand. During our time with the client, we helped them to implement relevant and meaningful templates to facilitate optimized processes in project planning.

UNLIMITED VISIBILITY & COLLABORATION

Leveraging Confluence's built-in social features, such as at-mentions, sharing, and commenting, requirements can be gathered on one document no matter the team size. Not only will the aforementioned templates assist with standardization, but Confluence also support versioning of documents and color-coded change notifications in the page to allow PM's to track the history of a page, and see who changed what. In recommending industry best practices, our resources worked with our client to help them develop plans to enforce page permissions (including viewing and editing) so ensure Confluence documents serve as a single point of truth for those who work on the project.

INTEGRATION WITH JIRA SOFTWARE

Once requirements are sufficiently built out in Confluence, our client began work on the project, using Jira Software to track their progress. Pointing Jira issues to related Confluence pages is just one of the Atlassian best practices we recommend to clients. Additionally, Jira issues can be created in-line from Confluence requirements pages, saving time and extra steps spent during context switching. For our client to get the best use out of Jira in relation to project planning in Confluence, we interpreted the client's process of work into a custom configuration of workflows to match industry terminology for our client, as well as to foster increased user adoption through native language. Standardizing the Jira workflow naming conventions and processes across projects allows our client's teams to seamlessly move between projects and also greatly assists in reporting for PM's and stakeholders as they track the overall progress of the release.

THE RESULTS

After our engagement with our client, their organization gained a process and custom configured tools for their needs that allowed them to bring on their new team, smoothly integrating into the project management cadence with clear expectations. We provided product training, including Atlassian best practices, process improvement recommendations, and resources for the company's move to an Agile/ SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) methodology to accommodate their rapid growth.

With our help, our client now manages their requirements in Confluence with the correct hierarchy in Jira to break down and organize their work at the portfolio and program levels.Learn how we helped our client with product training, including Atlassian best practices, process improvement recommendations, and resources for the company's move to an Agile/ SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) methodology to accommodate their rapid growth.

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