🌱 How the Learning Content Design team harnesses Jira

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Welcome to our new series! We’re so glad you’re here. In today’s post, we’ll explore how our team uses Atlassian tools and practices every day.

The scene: The Atlassian Learning team plans to publish a new learning path in eight weeks. Six members of the Learning Content Design team and three other members of Atlassian Learning will have a hand in the work. Halfway through, the project lead will unexpectedly have to step back to meet a pressing deadline on a different project. Still, everyone involved, from the course designers to the head of Atlassian Learning, will be able to track progress in real-time, smooth bumps, and roll out the learning path on schedule.

So how do they do it? Crystal ball? Relentless emails or Slacks? The answer is a proven project management methodology paired with a powerful Atlassian tool: the agile way of working + Jira.

Jira + agile together

The agile approach to project management breaks work into phases and emphasizes collaboration and improvement. Teams plan, execute, and evaluate in two-week cycles, called sprints. Agile practices alleviate many common stressors of our always-on, work-from-home lives while offering transparency to managers and stakeholders at every level.

Jira makes following agile practices straightforward. With Jira, you can easily organize your work items and place them within a larger context, supporting collaboration and visibility.

You might recognize Jira and agile practices as part of the software development and engineering world, but teams that never write a line of code are finding a lot of value in the combination, too.

We're not engineers, but we use Jira every day

Twelve members of the Learning Content Design team design, write, and build the lessons you see rolled out regularly on Atlassian Learning. Jira keeps this efficient, motivated crew informed of each other’s daily plans and progress and even makes it easy for one designer to step in for another if needed. With Jira, the team can celebrate wins and identify and address potential problems early.

Here’s a window into how the Learning Content Design team uses agile practices and Jira, without customizing the tool at all.

First, the team plans together

Every other Wednesday, the team meets to discuss what they’ll work on during the upcoming sprint. Each member creates a story for each planned work item and assigns the item points based on complexity: a straightforward, half-day work item is one point, while a multi-step work item that will take a few days is five points, and so on (you can read up on the pointing system here). If a project requires more than one work item, the team creates an epic to contain them all.

Team members ask for help with projects during sprint planning, and they help each other prioritize the most important work without burning out. Each team member’s sprint plan is an agreement with their manager about the work they’ll complete and the team’s Jira board offers stakeholders quick insights about planned, in-progress, and completed work.

Next, the team gets to work

Emily, the team's Content Strategist, uses Jira and agile practices to plan Atlassian Learning's content in the short and long term. Emily creates epics to track large projects and she creates stories within those epics to plan her day-to-day work. Emily recenlty use agile + Jira to revamp all guided learning paths.

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Becky, a Senior Learning Designer on the team, uses agile + Jira + agile practices to plan and produce lessons, courses, and learning paths.

When the Learning Content Design team planned to produce a learning path for Jira service project admins, Becky began by creating an epic to capture all the work and give stakeholders visibility into the team’s progress. Next, she thought of everything she would need to do to complete the project. Then, she created work items for each deliverable and put them into her backlog in Jira. Here’s a sampling:

• Plan and facilitate a project kick-off meeting
• Create a detailed design document for the learning path
• Write course 1, lesson 1
• Peer review course 1
• Publish the learning path

For each work item above, Becky included a detailed description, acceptance criteria (Jira’s version of “definition of done”), and story points.

Once Becky pulled work items into her sprint and assigned project work items to her team members, she started executing. She pulled the most critical item into her in-progress column. When she finished (and she met the acceptance criteria), she moved it to the done column and pulled the next work item into her in-progress column.

Pro tips:

• You can clone work items for similar types of work to save yourself time filling in the details.
• If you're not sure when you'll be able to tackle a work item but you don't want to forget about it, you can keep it in your backlog.
• You can communicate with team members and stakeholders right in your work item so you always have the context and details you need.

Then, the team stays on track 

During each sprint, the Learning Content Design team tracks progress during daily standup meetings. Each member takes a turn going through their planned, in-progress, and completed work items and any blockers — work impediments — they need help with. The team can calibrate work and progress in real-time and team members can step in to help as needed, keeping deliverables and deadlines on track.

Wondering how your team could use agile + Jira?

If you’re new to Jira, our Get the most out of Jira learning path is the best way to get started. You’ll learn Jira basics, including key terms and concepts and how to navigate the interface. You’ll also learn how to organize your work using work items, collaborate with team members, and customize your Jira experience. Then, you can dive deeper with scrum practices, build your Jira admin skills and more!

If you have questions for our team about how we use agile + Jira, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Keep an eye out for more "Behind the scenes with Atlassian Learning" posts. 🌱 

Read the whole series

[Jacqueline Westermayer]

Thanks for this stellar demonstration of Jira and Agile principles in action, Julia!😊 I couldn’t agree more that Atlassian tools are game-changers for professionals across industries, even without coding skills.

Keep rocking it out there!

[Kit Mitchell]

Hi there 🌱,

I’ve had a lot of experience with content development, training, and technical writing in the past, but I never considered using Jira tools for learning content management. This example and the detailed breakdown you’ve provided have really opened my eyes to how versatile Jira can be in supporting various workflows, even outside of traditional software development.

Thank you so much for sharing this – it's given me some great insights into how Jira can be applied to a wide range of tasks and roles. I’ll definitely be thinking more creatively about how to leverage these tools in the future!