We call the Atlassian way of working "Codeyard"
Codeyard is our all-in-one-project solution for every Atlassian tool installed, configured and heavily used with your employees. It involves all professional services and the software licenses at a guaranteed fixed price. It is all technology, organizational and cultural change in one project with senior advisors who both know the software inside out as well as being experienced at guiding you through the political challenges of changing the organizational DNA of your company.
It's the most challenging task I have ever worked on: Giving our customers the security of a high-quality project at a fixed price that is full of complexity and uncertainty. It is a standardized approach to an individual problem in your company, where we take the risk of extra work.
But let's talk about the Atlassian tool stack and how users can use it as a holistic solution to delivering value to customers (with or without software).
One Software to beat its specific competitors
Atlassian has a best of breed approach, where they have different products which all compete in their own markets.
- HipChat against Slack
- Confluence against Google Docs, Office 365 and SharePoint
- JIRA against Quality Center, BMC, VersionOne, Rally, Bugzilla, Redmine, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Pivotal Tracker and a plethora of other software alternatives
- Bitbucket against Github
- Bamboo against Jenkins
Especially in the non-developer-front we see stronger competitors. But they all lack that integrated experience, that Atlassian can offer.
The complete journey as a user through the Atlassian tools
What we try to support with Codeyard is the complete journey for users through Atlassian tools. It does not necessarily mean that one user is taking all these steps. And it doesn't mean either that all of these steps are taken sequentially. But nevertheless this flow is very common for companies that want to produce results.
It is a concept to launch approach that most product and service companies need to offer their customers to create value.
The concept level: ideas, discussions and decisions
At first people have ideas. It's not only the CEO or C-level managers who have good ideas. It is probably safe to assume that even the most hierarchical companies have understood that smart people help them the most. To leverage the idea potential we need to get our employees connected digitally.
HipChat: The operating system of collaboration for tomorrow
HipChat is the core to what most people only know from Whatsapp today. Instantaneous chat with individuals and groups. Mentioning this first is not meaning that HipChat and group chat is limited to idea generation. It is more like the lifeblood of a modern companies' organization. The thing that may even reign email one day.
You may not be there in your company yet. But that's why we offer these Codeyard projects to change that. For this blog post we'll assume that the company and employees described here, live modern organization and technology in an optimal way.
So the employees use HipChat all the time. To coordinate daily work, to exchange ideas, to connect over long distances. They chat, they call and they use video conferencing to stay close to their project teams.
Microblogging: The facebook and twitter for your company
It is an addition to what Atlassian does and I do not know, how they can live without it. It's like having Whatsapp and Wikipedia but no Facebook and no Twitter. I could not live without it. And most of our corporate customers can live without group chat but would really like to have microblogging.
Microblogging for Confluence allows for quick one to many posting of small news and updates. Where HipChat is chatting and live discussion, microblogging is threaded, it is contextual, it has deep links and it is fully and natively integrated into Confluence. Some say, that instant messaging is already bigger than social platforms. It does not eliminate the fact, that Facebook and Twitter are two of the top ten most popular websites worldwide. Microblogging is really strong. Yammer is the Microsoft equivalent. The startup was sold for 1,2 billion dollars in 2012. Back then that was an enormous amount of money (and still is today).
Microblogging in companies is used for discussions, short project updates, sales info, sharing pictures and charts, pointing others to content in other systems, asking questions and all the sorts of things that you see on facebook and twitter daily.
Confluence: The knowledge base to store documents, all info and decisions
Confluence is the wikipedia of your company. It is the best enterprise wiki in the world. I guess you won't find anyone who will doubt that. It has the most powerful rich text editor of all web software available. It helps your employees store documents of all file types, create and work on info like meeting protocols, concepts, architecture and plans collaboratively and record decisions to come back to later. It is not only the solution to collaboration on all sorts of texts but also the best way to retrieve info and research past things.
JIRA: Where you actually organize and do work
The amount of competitors is huge. They are all successful. But the more complex things get, and the more people get involved, the more successful JIRA is. There is a reason that JIRA is only 10 USD for teams below 10 people. If you have 150 employees there is nothing that really compares to JIRA. It's where scrum teams plan their sprints, organize their backlog and keep their work status current. It's good for kanban teams. It has it's own unique approach to service desks and can also help business users organize tasks very easily.
But for Codeyard we leverage the power of JIRA mainly for software development and will help you understand and love the interconnectedness with the other tools.
Bitbucket: Store and develop your code together
Atlassian started to call the product Stash and its sole focus on git was disturbing for me. Today github is still a little bigger, but the behind the firewall user experience and the way you can intertwine this git repository management system with the other Atlassian tools is unrivaled. It has become the centerpiece of code generation of engineers in a lot of software teams.
Bamboo: The build server that automates a lot of quality assurance
While we still see companies use Jenkins more than Bamboo, it also benefits from the deep integration in Bitbucket and JIRA. The added transparency is a key differentiator and will continue its rise in the market.
Let them all work together
A lot of those reading this will have a subset of Atlassian tools sitting in their corporate environments. But are they connected? Do your employees actively link JIRA issues and Confluence pages in both directions? Do you see git branches in your JIRA issues? Can you see the built results in your issue? Want to know what this can look like? See a demo from Jens Schumacher and myself here:
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Do you want to get more out of your Atlassian tools? Do you have trouble activating your users to fully leverage the potential? Do you want to work better with these tools internally? Contact us and find out more about Codeyard.