Atlassian Together – a Work Management Suite for the New World of Collaboration

Diesen Artikel auf Deutsch lesen

The world of work has changed, and many companies are now organizing themselves differently than before the pandemic, which accelerated many developments - including the adoption of distributed teams. The Atlassian Together product suite will help organizations transform into an open, agile, transparent collaboration culture and give them the toolset to enable modern collaboration within and across teams.

Atlassian Together is a single Cloud subscription to the full suite of work management products, consisting of the feature-rich editions of Trello, Confluence, Jira Work Management and Atlas. Secure and simple user administration is provided by the Atlassian Access identity and access management solution. This packaged solution is optimized for how teams work and seamlessly connects them without forcing consolidation into a single software.

Why Atlassian Together?

Close collaboration between an organization's business teams (for example, finance, marketing, HR, legal) and technical teams (i.e., IT, software development, etc.) has never been more important. Across industries, technical teams form the heart of almost every agile transformation initiative.

In today's turbulent macro climate, an organization's ability to respond to dynamic change in an agile manner can make all the difference. And that also goes for engaged, empowered, motivated and loyal employees who identify with the organization and its goals.

Yet cross-cutting team collaboration and seamless collaboration between business and technical teams remain elusive concepts in most enterprise organizations. Why? Because business and technical teams operate in silos. They work with completely different platforms, use separate and unlinked tools, and have workflows and processes that rarely resonate in unison.

These silos of work and applications made cross-enterprise collaboration difficult, and they undercut any organizational attempt to take teamwork and employee engagement to a higher level.

The key challenges are getting employees on the same page and providing them with efficient access to information - and these challenges have intensified in the last two or three years. Companies need to balance disparate work styles and tool ecosystems and create a solution that unites individuals and teams.

Atlassian Together aims to help with that, connecting teams with different ways of working so that they collaborate better. Atlassian Together products allow each team to operate in their preferred way while eliminating communication, integration and tool barriers.

Positive network effects on productivity, profitability and employee engagement are natural results. Atlassian Together is set …

  • to achieve alignment across teams around business goals and track work progress.
  • to foster collaboration on projects that span tools, teams and locations.
  • to give people access to the right information from the right teams at the right time.
  • to smooth transitions between individual, team-based and cross-team work without context loss.

More intention in work management software decisions

Today's economic uncertainty is causing many organizations to re-evaluate their tool providers. Companies are approaching decisions regarding their work management solutions with more intention. Most importantly, they are asking themselves how to break down tool redundancies and silos.

Companies are seeking to standardize platforms that allow and support scaling without adding to the burden of IT teams. Moreover, many companies would prefer to collaborate with fewer partners and elevate that collaboration to a more strategic level.

Atlassian Together gives customers access to a suite of proven and successful work management tools. This solution allows organizations to standardize on the Atlassian platform, eliminating redundancies while saving costs.

However, standardization based on Atlassian does not mean entering a closed system. Instead, Atlassian's work management strategy is to provide customers with an ecosystem of numerous integrations. Such integrations exist for leading collaboration solutions such as Slack, Miro, Figma, and other vendors for more specialized use cases.

This means that teams in the company do not have to abandon their tried-and-tested methods and tools in favor of a top-down solution, but can continue to use them in an integrated environment.

Empowering asynchronous collaboration

In the world of distributed teams, people need the ability to use asynchronous work methods effectively and efficiently. But the shift to asynchronous collaboration has yet to be universally successful: Atlassian's State of Teams Report 2022 indicated that remote and hybrid workers spend 60 percent more time in meetings. That's not a good trend. Spending more time in meetings (especially meetings with little value) is bad for team productivity; it burdens, annoys and frustrates many employees.

Maximally integrated work management tools, like the ones Atlassian Together brings, help improve asynchronous communication. People can easily pick up where other team members left off without needing everyone to be in a meeting room or on a shared call. Tracking, tracing and contributing to important work and discussions are no longer tied to synchronous voting.

It's easy to find and interact with the right information. Atlassian Together tools alleviate the tedious, frustrating hunt for context and enables teams to work as productively and efficiently as possible from any location.

Atlassian Together provides ...

  • a work hub that provides direction at any point in time. Trello keeps people organized at the individual, team, or cross-team level.
  • access to the collaboratively collected knowledge of the company. In Confluence, users have a knowledge management center at their fingertips, where they can easily find what they need.
  • visibility of goals across the company including the goal achievement status. In Atlas, each team has the ability to communicate their progress and make it transparent.
  • scalable project and program management. With Jira Work Management, the entire process from idea to completion can be mapped along with all dependencies.
  • context at any time. Atlassian Work Management products proactively provide background information at every level of task processing.
    best practices and minimal barriers to entry. Atlassian Together provides templates and guidance for several common use cases to help teams work effectively and productively faster.

Atlassian Together - a Work Management Suite for the New World of Collaboration - All apps in Atlassian Together

Employee engagement through autonomy and the right tools

Creating an environment that fosters engagement starts with balancing alignment and autonomy. There must be alignment among employees and teams regarding small and large goals. In doing so, they must clearly understand how their work contributes to the organization's overall success. But on the other hand, teams need the autonomy and freedom to work in the way that gets them the best results.

Achieving the right balance can be challenging because there is a contrast between the needs of the employees and those of the business. For example, we know that employees prefer flexible work situations. On the other hand, we keep hearing from some conservative leaders that workplace flexibility and workforce productivity are mutually exclusive concepts.

This implies that organizations that adopt flexible work practices would find lower productivity acceptable. Conversely, only strict attendance requirements would achieve the highest possible productivity.

This is nonsense, of course, and executives should have realized during the pandemic (at the latest) that there is no causal relationship between productivity and an employee's location to begin with. Many modern companies demonstrate day in and day out that highly flexible workplaces and maximum productivity can go hand in hand - provided the company has a set of tools and methods that allow people to make lasting connections to the goals, teams and work within the organization with minimal effort.

And closely related to this is the formation and consolidation of employee engagement:

  • Employees can create their own work management hubs or dashboards and customize them to their needs. This opens a window to work across teams and tools that can create connections and a sense of identity.
  • Smart links help save time, automate knowledge and information discovery, and accelerate decision-making by providing context without requiring a user to leave Atlassian Together products.
  • Everyone in the organization can track progress against shared team goals by subscribing to project updates. This avoids many time-consuming status meetings of little value.
  • @-Mentions, tagging, following, giving kudos, leaving comments - teams have various interaction options that promote communication and collaboration and benefit from deep integration between products. All these features help support a globally distributed workforce infrastructure in asynchronous collaboration.

Do you want to know more about Atlassian Together? Would you like to see the product suite in action? Our Atlassian experts look forward to talking with you and your team: Get in touch!

Further Reading

Forget Less and Ensure Quality with didit Checklists for Atlassian Cloud Forget Less and Ensure Quality with didit Checklists for Atlassian Cloud Forget Less and Ensure Quality with didit Checklists for Atlassian Cloud