[CASE STUDY] How Community and Learning Ops at Atlassian enhanced collaboration across six teams

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When you’re tasked with unifying 6 teams, each with about 10 team members, into a single organization, one of the first questions that comes up is “how are we going to work together?”

That’s what @Cassie Mayes, Senior Team Lead on the Community and Learning Operations team, tackled when it was time to bring teams from across the Community and Learning organizations together.

Table of contents

The opportunity

• Milestone 1: Audit current ways of working
• Milestone 2: Decide on tooling going forward
• Milestone 3: Prioritize projects and align teams
• Milestone 4: Enable the teams
• Milestone 5: Teams start using Jira 🚀

Learnings and recommendations

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The opportunity

Team changes happen, and when they do, you can use the adjustment period as a chance to take your collaboration to the next level. Most likely, everyone will be used to slightly different ways of working — so now is the best time to take the best of each style and turn it into an operating model that scales.

For Cassie, it all started when she formed a working group with @Tiffany Scolnic, Senior Program Manager, and @Jack Brickey, IT Project Manager and Jira Admin, to get the process kicked off. They aligned on their goal:

Create a unified planning and prioritization process to foster shared visibility into each team’s priorities. This will enable teams to collaborate more effectively and gain insight into all areas of work for the year. Additionally, establish a standardized method for monitoring work and progress to provide senior and executive leadership with clear visibility into deliverables, risks, and future plans.

And defined what success would look like:

✅ Teams are able to confidently commit to and complete planned work each quarter

✅ Teams are following established Scrum events to plan, execute, and communicate their work each sprint

✅ All team members are regularly tracking their work in Jira

✅ Processes, guidelines, standards, etc. are well-documented, adapted, and utilized by all teams

✅ All team members are actively participating in the cadence of the team and attending Scrum events

Why Scrum? For the Community and Learning organization, applying some Agile 101 concepts like sprints and standups was the best project management fit for the way the team intakes requests and works at scale. Even though their team doesn’t have dedicated, full-time Scrum Masters and team members instead volunteer to take on the responsibilities of that role, operating within the framework helps them share work across the team, understand their velocity, and create reasonable roadmaps. No matter how you choose to organize your team, Jira is flexible enough to support any way of working.

Finally, the working group set their milestones:

1. Audit current ways of working (tooling and tracking) for all C&L (Community and Learning) teams

2. Decide on tooling going forward

3. Prioritize projects and align teams

4. Enable the teams

5. Teams start using Jira 🚀

Now it was time for the work to begin.

Milestone 1: Audit current ways of working

Before any change management process kicked off, Cassie, Tiffany, and Jack started by assessing the current state of project management across the teams.

It started with a simple form — Confluence style. Each team lead filled out their row of this table:

“Hopes and dreams” meant questions like:

• What is important to you with regards to reporting?

• What is important to you when it comes to visibility into the team’s work?

• What level of detail would you like to see?

• What metrics are you responsible for reporting out?

That column then turned into a recommendation that was shared with leadership:

To achieve the leadership’s vision for FY25, it’s recommended to utilize Atlassian tools and agile ceremonies to provide transparency into work. This will also allow for teams to have visibility into the work of other teams and allow for more collaboration efforts.

At this stage, based on the representatives' answers, it became clear that one team had progressed far enough in their agile journey that they could be used to model project management practices for this new, broader organization.

Milestone 2: Decide on tooling going forward

After getting to know each workflow better, it was time to define a tooling strategy that would get everyone speaking the same language. But that doesn’t just mean choose the tools and hope for the best, it was three owners committing to these key elements so that the project would actually be successful as it grew:

1. Agile Training & Enablement:

   • Train, mentor and support the team (Leads + ICs) on Agile values as well as principles and practices to plan, manage, and deliver solutions

   • Monitor agile progress and performance and help teams to make improvements

   • Schedule and facilitate scrum events before handing off to the teams to facilitate on their own

2. Tooling

   • Recommend tools and tooling best practices to align with the specific needs of the team with regard to intake, progress tracking, and reporting

   • Use team data and research to determine which tools should be standard across the board and where teams have autonomy

   • Identify which tools will unblock team leads and provide them the visibility they need into tracking team work

   • Identify the best tooling options to report up and out on the team’s progress

   • Create structure within the tool to meet the needs of the team (including fields, labels, reports, etc)

3. Reporting & Ceremonies

   • Support with OKR planning and delivery

   • Operationalize delivery and drive work forward

   • Ensure that the teams are unblocked by tracking and mitigating significant risks and issues

   • Ensure that reporting mechanisms are created, managed, tagged, linked, and well-defined

   • Support the breakdown of the KRs and/or milestones into projects with clear success criteria

   • Partner with delivery teams to manage work breakdown that meets the definition of done

   • Support building and maintaining a project roadmap

   • Ensure project status is reported on a recurring cadence

   • Provide updates to key stakeholders and leaders on OKR programs on a regular basis

So, why did Cassie and the leads ultimately choose Jira?

“It helped us have a single source of truth for the team’s work and made it more transparent for everyone, including cross-functional stakeholders. The individual views are helpful as well as the roadmap views, which let us see across teams and projects.”

Milestone 3: Prioritize projects and align teams

At this point, it was time to make sure that every single member of the team felt supported in adopting Jira — no matter where their project management practices currently were.

All of the data that was gathered during Milestone 1 had been analyzed for common themes and areas of improvement and turned into a proposal that was shared back with everyone for feedback and validation.

Next, the question “Where do we start?” was answered.

Cassie, Tiffany, and Jack thought it’d be best to get a Jira project spun up first, and then choose a team to be their beta testers before scaling out to the rest of the org. This team were the first to access their new project management home, get oriented on the key features, and receive some basic training on Agile concepts. Once they’d provided their feedback and felt comfortable using Jira, the working group went on a “roadshow” demo-ing the project to the rest of the teams.

Milestone 4: Enable the teams

With the beta feedback in and the roadshow done, the choice to use Jira was even more solidified and the program managers had everything they needed for the enablement stage. Now, they were in the homestretch before the teams actually got up and running, so it was important to deliver trainings on topics like:

• How to use the tools

• Agile training

• Defining work

• Expectations and guidelines

• Ceremonies

• FAQs

Now that everyone was equipped with the knowledge of how the tool works and all the shared rituals around it, it was time to officially get together on Jira.

Milestone 5: Teams start using Jira 🚀

Jira was now ready for every team to dive in, but it was time to make sure the teams were ready for Jira. The operations leads created a checklist to make the transition as easy as possible.

1. They asked teammates to take the following Learning courses:

• [REQUIRED] Get started with Jira

• [REQUIRED] Apply Agile Practices to Manage Your Work

• [OPTIONAL] The Agile Coach - Atlassian's no-nonsense guide to agile development

2. They introduced internal best practices around concepts like ceremony timelines, work types, and story points, and shared resources like Agile retrospectives 101.

3. The Jira admin held brief sessions with each team to illustrate how the project and their board works.

4. They asked teams to appoint their scrum leads.

After that, there were standing weekly meetings where each team’s dedicated scrum masters/leads could come together, share ideas, and help each other problem solve.

Learnings and recommendations

After using Jira for two quarters, the broader Community and Learning team has fully embraced this centralized, transparent way of working. Not only that, they’ve already built the expertise and streamlined even further to fit their needs.

• One of the teams integrated their Jira Service Management service desk with their Jira project so that work tracking is seamless, whether it be tickets from stakeholder teams or tickets they input on their own.

• Some teams have expressed interest in trying Jira Product Discovery. Cassie plans to gather more feedback via survey and look into bringing the new tool into the fold.

With one shared platform across so many different workstreams, everyone from team members to company leadership have a clear view into how this new, very multi-functional organization is driving impact.

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Your turn

Check out our latest announcements from Team '25 to see how Rovo can help you streamline your move to Jira every step of the way.

Read the rest of our case studies!

Got questions for Cassie, Tiffany, and Jack? Have recommendations from your own experience running operations on Atlassian? Get the conversation started below! 👇

[John Funk]

Wait, what??? @Abby Stiris and @Jack Brickey working together? Why do I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone???

[Jack Brickey]

@John Funk , one word multi-verse. Of course the Jack involved in this effort is the original and likely not the best.

[Sherilyn Swan]

This is FiRE!!!