Although being an Atlassian Expert for quite a while now, we haven’t managed to attend the Atlassian Summit in the past years. We finally made it this year and were looking forward to four days packed with interesting conversations, informative talks and exciting announcements.
The Atlassian Ecosystem Day on day one has been a great start and provided insights into Atlassian’s roadmap and strategy for their line of products and services.
The fireside chat with the founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhaat in the evening of day two was mainly centered around culture and rituals in a company of constant growth. What caught our attention especially is how Atlassian tries to increase the visibility and transparency of their numerous (software) projects.
Project Central
Communication is hard and tends to be constrained to relatively closely related/located teams. To share knowledge across the entire organization of 1.200 employees in 12 different geographies with 300+ active projects they introduced Project Central.
Project Central basically consists of a project cheat sheet that answers the core questions on a project in a common language in a central location. Each project will has to answer the questions like:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- When will it ship?
- How are we tracking?
- Who is the full time owner?
This cheat sheet has to be updated once a week by the project team. Anyone who is interested in the project can simply watch a project - technically the cheat sheet is just a JIRA issue - and will receive a weekly digest of all projects watched by mail, along with a list of projects that have been added in the last week.
Atlassian is sharing more insights on Project Central in the session: Cutting Through the Noise: Breaking Down Hierarchical Communication Channels and Silos.
We are hiring! If you want to be part of our team of Atlassian Experts we are to happy to hear from you.