With hundreds of Marketplace apps, you can extend Confluence capabilities to solve complex business problems.

Need to build dynamic forms for data collection? Gather survey data to make informed decisions? Or even automate workflows inside Confluence? You can achieve all that with just a single app! 

Meet Forms for Confluence, our top-selling app for creating forms and surveys for Confluence. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to build forms and enhance Confluence’s collaboration capabilities. Let’s dive in! 

There’s more to Confluence than just a technical documentation platform. 

For teams who handle support tickets or rely on survey feedback for decision making, having the right information at the right time is critical. While Confluence is perfect for content creation, it lacks the form builders or survey tools needed for data collection and insight generation. 

“We’re already using Google Form to run surveys, what’s the difference?”

Third-party tools like Google Form may introduce more friction into your team’s workflow, especially when your organisation collaborates entirely on Confluence.  

Let’s say form submission is a required step for a specific operational process. You’ll need a way to review the information submitted and escalate the request to the right team. 

Or if you want to monitor your team’s health, it’s easier to run a pulse survey right within your HR Confluence space, where your team shares company-wide initiatives.  

Most importantly, you'll want to have all your form responses securely stored inside Confluence for greater control over your team’s data.

So the real question is less about which tool is better, but more about how you can create a seamless form and survey experience using Confluence itself.

Below are three key benefits of having a form building solution within Confluence:

Take advantage of Confluence for all communication purposes: Reimagine Confluence beyond a knowledge base. Equip your team with the tools to gather feedback, conduct surveys, or capture data to make informed decisions, right from their Confluence workspace. 

Minimise app-switching for frictionless collaboration: RingCentral and CITE Research indicates that workers are likely to lose their train of thought while navigating between apps. It’s time to say goodbye to tedious external link sharing and manual data entry. With Forms for Confluence, you’ll have a complete form database right within Confluence ready for use.

Create advanced workflow in Confluence: Need to capture information to escalate a task to the appropriate department? By having users fill out a form, you can ensure the right information is delivered to the right person, anytime.

Next, we’ll walk you through the step-by-step guide to creating a form using Forms for Confluence app. 

What are the benefits of Confluence forms and surveys?

If you’re already familiar with Confluence macros, then creating forms will be very natural.

Get your free trial of Forms for Confluence by clicking the button below and follow our 3-step guide below.  

How to create forms in Confluence in 3 easy steps

Before jumping into a page and adding your form, you’ll need to define a Form Id. An Id is a unique form label, which is also used as a database name for your form responses. 

Under Forms Configurations, you’ll find the option to add a new configuration.

Step 1: Configure a new form in your Confluence space

Click Add Form configuration to assign a new unique Id to your form. Note that the Id field is case sensitive.

✅ Tip: Determine a naming convention for your form Id, eg by types or departments, to ensure it’s understandable by anyone who needs to use it. 

Now, you can go ahead and create a new page or open an existing page where you wish to publish your form. 

Navigate to the Confluence editor, select the Forms for Confluence macros from the macro list…

Step 2: Add the respective form Id to your Confluence page 

…or alternatively, you can type /forms and pick the Forms for Confluence macro suggestion.

Then, simply fill in the form Id that you’ve created earlier.

Click Save and you’ll see an empty box. This is the space in which you’ll be able to add custom fields to build a complete form, as shown in the next step.

Within the Forms for Confluence macro, insert form fields using the same shortcut /form. You’ll see a list of field macros to choose from. 

Step 3: Create relevant form fields using Form macros

Once you’ve added all the desired fields, preview and hit publish once everything is ready. 

That’s it! You’ve successfully created a form in Confluence.

✅ Tip: If you’re using Forms for Confluence Server or Data Center, leverage our blueprints to get started quickly instead of creating a new form from scratch.

You can access the pre-configured form via the Confluence template library.

As mentioned earlier, while it’s possible to use Google Forms or other external apps to create forms in Confluence, what’s missing is the ability to capture and process the responses within Confluence. 

That’s where Forms for Confluence shines! 

The same approach to power and flexibility is applied to the management of form responses. With a built-in database, you can choose to save, view and export responses to a form directly from Confluence, or you can send a form submission to email addresses to put the data instantly in the hands of your users. You can even do both!

A nice function that our users enjoy is the ability to display responses directly on a Confluence page without having to copy-paste the data. Using the Responses Table macro, you can instantly populate all responses and document them on a respective Confluence page.

Collect responses and share information easily with Forms for Confluence Cloud

You can give authorised users access to the information they need to make informed decisions, anytime.

Ready to take your Confluence instance to the next level? Install Forms for Confluence for free today!

Forms for Confluence brings the best elements of forms and Confluence together. Create forms in Confluence and change the way your teams work.

How to create forms in Confluence Cloud

Forms for Confluence will help you enhance Confluence's collaboration capabilities. Here's how to add a f...

How to create forms in Confluence Cloud for data collection

On this episode of Team Titans, hosts Ryan Spilken and Petula Neale have a fun discussion with Adaptavist Software Engineer Tiffany Wortham.

Tiffany is a young developer with a ton of talent and a keen eye for DevOps-style automation and itterative team improvement. Her laid-back, can-do attitude and open approach to the world of software is both insightful and refreshing.

Hello and welcome to Adaptavist Live Team Titans. The stories of people with unique perspectives on work itself, defining or breaking processes, building tools, leading teams, and anything in between. I'm your host, Ryan Spilken and joining me as co-host today is the one and only Petula Neale. Petula, thank you so much for taking the time to record with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a lovely diversion from my day activity of being a Project Manager here at Adaptavist. Our team primarily is working with contracts, presales, day-to-day management of engagements. So, this is a legit treat.

Now, you have scheduled in time for this, I assume. And you know exactly where to track your ticket, right? You got all that?

Yes. I was very impressed. I usually don't see this kind of organization outside of professional services. I actually had somewhere to log my time for this. So thank you.

Well, you're welcome. Now, one of the reasons that I wanted so bad to have you as a co-host for this episode is because you podcast in real life. Tell us about your "side-hustle" podcast.

Yeah, well, in my, I'm not going to call it youth, in my younger, old period, I used to podcast about movies. That's not a thing as much right now. So, for the past little over a year, I've been the co-host of Back Issue Bloodbath. It's a podcast primarily about comics, not just really old ones, but old, new, independents; a strong recommendation for one I recently read called, Living Heroes, an independent comic by Stephanie Williams. And it's a mashup of the TV show, Living Single, and a lot of the black female Marvel characters. So, imagine them living together in a New York apartment, having a salty Storm as your roommate, who when the air conditioning goes out, only uses her powers on herself. And also Jessica Jones brings a very not great potato salad. So, we love our allies, but just because you're invited to the cookout, doesn't mean you should try to go for one of those big dishes y'all.

We're going to have to talk about this when it comes to macaroni and cheese, but that's another time. And joining us today as our special guest is Adaptavist Software Engineer, Tiffany Wortham. Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us on Team Titans.

Tiffany has written several blog posts that are available at adaptavist.com and some scripts that you'll find on the Adaptavist Library and has recently been promoted to full-time software engineer. So Tiffany, how did you even get started in software engineering?

So way back in the day, when I was in high school, actually my freshman year of high school, I got put in this HTML and CSS class that I did not ask to be in. I had no idea what it was. I thought I was going to be in a study hall of that hour. My school counselor just put me in it, just I don't know why. I'm glad she did though. So, I go to this class, I start doing it and I'm like, "Oh, actually, this is pretty cool." "I like this a lot." So, then my senior year, my school was offering a programming class. I took that. And then I decided, "Yeah, I think I want to go to school for computer science." So, that's what I did. And the rest is history.

Now, Tiffany, when I was in high school, if I had been placed in a class that I didn't want to go to. On that first day, if it didn't grab me, I'd have been out, right?

I mean, I just thought it sounded cool or at least interesting. Because prior to this, I really had almost no exposure to coding of any kind. Well, except for I guess Minecraft. With Minecraft, people like doing modding and stuff like that and all of that kind of thing. So, actually maybe that's why I think, I was kind of a little bit exposed to this stuff through Minecraft. And then I was, "Oh folks, this seems kind of cool." That stuff. So, that's probably why actually.

So, when I was probably older than you, but younger than I am now, one of the things in JavaScript I've found the coolest the first time I used it was, well, two things. Rollovers and redirects. Things that are very useful or very flashy, appealed to me. So, when you were first learning the code, what was one of the first things that you did you thought, "Oh, that's super cool." Or "That's dead useful," and people should be building this in every page they make or every application.

Interesting. So, when I was in that class, it was very introductory. So, we barely got into any JavaScript. I can't even remember if we got into anything like that. But, I think probably a moment that I felt like that was probably happened more in that programming class that I took in my senior year and it was in Visual Basic. So that was a fun time. But it was basically just like creating these applications we... Like our final was to create this game of Yahtzee. And I think that that was pretty cool. I was, "Oh, I can just make a game." "I can just program a game." That's pretty cool, I mean, it's Yahtzee, so it's not a blast, but I was just, "Wow." "Okay, cool." "I can do stuff like this."

That's awesome. I had a touring class and I don't think we did anything more exciting than a number randomizer. Although now, after watching the movie about the whole code breaking thing, that makes more sense. You know what, shouts to you, Mrs. Berotta. That was actually legit.

Okay. Hold on. But Tiffany, I personally love Yahtzee.

So, just to say that it's not a blast. I have to take exception to that because man, can I get down on a game of Yahtzee?

So, you are based in Springfield, Missouri.

You got your Bachelors in Information Science at Missouri State University. What was it like doing your studies there?

Yeah. So doing my studies, studying computer science at Missouri State was, some of the classes were great. Sometimes I had a blast. Some of them were pretty boring, honestly. But it was cool. I would say the classes that I enjoyed the most though were my philosophy classes, which I minored in philosophy. And honestly, I think I kind of just liked the Humanities Department a lot better in general, and the classes that I had there, I found a lot more interesting. And I guess I've more thought of my computer science classes as me, learning my trade or whatever. But I did learn a lot. And who knows, I don't know, maybe if it would have been switched, maybe if I had majored in philosophy and minored in computer science that maybe I would find my philosophy classes to be a chore and then really enjoy my computer science classes.

So, maybe it's just whatever your focus is, becomes a chore. But, I don't know. I'm glad that I got to study both.

What concept and philosophy really sort of blew the back out for you and really opened your mind. For me, I took one philosophy course, and then there was this whole discussion around happiness versus content. Being content. Content can be sustained, but happiness is sort of fleeting. And that really stuck with me.

Yeah. That is a juicy question. I would say probably, I don't know. I probably couldn't choose one concept or idea. But probably a couple of different things that grabbed me the most, that I found the most interesting, where I took this philosophical ideas and literature class and we read just like Philip K. Dick books. And I don't know if either of you have read any Philip K. Dick, but it's nuts.

So good. So rich. Especially, probably my favorite was, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Probably my favorite book of all time. I don't even know how to describe it. There's so much to it, but if you ever get a chance to read it, you should read that. The second thing would probably just be my aesthetics class in general. So like philosophy of art, what is art actually? Can you define it? What's its function? That class was incredible. So I would say those two, that class and that book, those are probably my two favorite things.

And does any of the philosophy learning that you did inform you're developing today?

I think it was really good that I studied philosophy and computer science side by side, especially in those introductory philosophy classes. You sort of learn how to reason, you learn about formal logic and things like that. And I think that is very helpful in sort of, I don't know. Learning to reason, logic, things like that, that really ties in quite a bit with programming obviously. So, I think that helped quite a bit. Yeah.

Alright, Tiffany. So, what philosophy or approach do you take when you're solving a problem? When you get handed a bug or a new feature, where does your mind go and how do you sort of tease out the solution?

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I mean, it definitely does depend on what it is that I'm working on. Whether it's a bug or a feature or anything like that. They definitely... Everything takes some kind of investigation, but investigation will look different for each thing. So for a bug, I pretty much just jump into the code, the number one thing, the first thing that you want to do is make sure that you can reproduce the bug. So once you've reproduced it, you can start jumping into the code, trying to find out why lots of debugging. That sort of investigation is jumping in, getting right down to the root, trying to track it down.

If I'm creating a feature that is the exploratory part of it is a whole, a lot bigger part of the process before I ever totally jump in and start, trying to go at it. I'm definitely, kind of doing a little research on, "Okay, what features are similar to this?" "What code can I reuse?" "What classes can I reuse?" "What can I model this off of?" "What's the best approach?" "What are some multiple different approaches?" So before I even get started, before I even start writing, there's a lot of just thinking and forethought that goes into that.

If you have to do some refactoring, what's your approach to estimating that? Because I always find, it's really nebulous if somebody says, "Oh, this area of the code requires some refactoring." There's always, that I feel, that's tougher to be able to pin down. How long that will take? So what's your approach there?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say with refactoring, I don't know. Generally my philosophy on estimating how long things are going to take. It's just hard to say sometimes. I can spit all it, but especially with refactoring, it's hard to tell. So having a good idea of how long something like that is going to take is not something that I've mastered yet. So...

Legit curiosity. I don't think I've ever worked with a developer that's actually good at estimating refactoring. So you're fine.

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I would say I'm not really good at estimating how long anything is going to take. So, you know.

I've been in IT just over 20 years, good Lord. And I've only worked with one developer that estimated perfectly. Her name is Nicole Jia. Shoutout to Nicole, wherever you are. And she told me that she just looked at sort of different criteria, including how long it took her to develop something similar in the past. Is it net new or is there stuff around it that she has to be careful of? And then the third thing was she would come up with a number and then she would double it. After a year of working with her and query, she was estimating stuff down to two hours and was perfect. Almost every time, I thought she was a witch. I didn't know what's going on. And then finally after months of me nagging her, just like, "How do you do it?" "Are you a wizard, Harry?" "Please teach the others," she told me that. And then she did that at the end and then I double it. And then she shrugged and looked away. I just, to this day, that woman is an enigma to me. Hey, I love her, but she was a mystery.

So, when you're working and you get a regression or a bug, something that used to work and doesn't anymore, what's your approach to that. And also how do you try to ensure it doesn't happen again?

Yeah. So basically, and honestly, this is probably what anyone else would say, but the most important thing is that, you, instead of just manually testing it, you actually write a test for it. And you make sure that before your fix, the test fails and after your fix the test passes. I mean, it's classic, basic, but I mean, really, I don't know. That's how you do it. You fix the bug, you make sure that instead of just manually testing it, you write a test to have there forever. And that's the best way I know.

And then once you test it, you test it again.

And again. Tiffany, you've had some blogs published on adaptavist.com and you've added a few scripts to the Adaptavist Library that help users of the ScriptRunner suite make more out of Confluence. Now, these are great pieces that the codes are awesome. If you were given a chance, what other feature or topic would you write about?

On this episode of Team Titans, hosts Ryan Spilken and Petula Neale have a fun discussion with Adaptavist Software Engineer Tiffany Wortham.

Tiffany is a young developer with a ton of talent and a keen eye for DevOps-style automation and team improvement. Her laid-back, can-do attitude and open approach to the world of software is both insightful and refreshing.

Transcript: Team Titans Season Two, Episode 4 - Tiffany Wortham

Listen to young developer Tiffany Wortham talk about getting into code, automation, and the philosophy be...

Team Titans Season 2, Episode 4 - Tiffany Wortham

A well-organised, carefully thought-out wiki can not only act as a company intranet, but also facilitate collaboration within your business. If you’ve seen our blog on creating an engaging Confluence wiki you’ll know how to put together a basic framework - but what about customising your wiki to make it personal and unique to your organisation? 

With the right tools, your wiki can become not just a single source of truth for your organisation, but also a hub for teamwork and collaboration. Here’s how Content Formatting Macros can help:

Are you ready to enhance your Confluence wiki?

The beauty of Confluence is that it can be customised to completely change not just how pages and spaces look, but also how users can interact with them. Content Formatting Macros for Confluence will help to format your wiki and make it more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing. Here’s a run down of some of the most helpful macros for your business wiki:

Make your wiki more engaging with Content Formatting Macros 

An example of a company wiki made in Confluence with Content Formatting Macros

The Tabs macro groups relevant information together in a tidy, categorised way that encourages users to interact with the page to find out more. Use it in your wiki to separate different roles and requirements within a project, or simply to restructure large documents in a more visual way.

Use the Tooltip macro anywhere you want to add detail to a page without taking up more space. When this macro is in place, users can hover over the icon to be shown a popup of text. This is ideal for referencing and annotations, and can be used in technical documentation to expand on points without adding more information to the body text.

When you click on the “i” icon in the main text body, a popup appears to provide more information

Make pages infinitely more interactive with the Button Group macro and Button Hyperlink macro. Create dedicated hyperlink buttons to encourage users to click through to relevant pages and spaces, increasing engagement and adding a touch of style to your wiki.

Give more context to your users with the Progress Bar macro. This is particularly helpful when structuring process documentation, giving readers a clear visual idea of what stage or phase a project is in, or how their part in the process fits into the wider timeline. Use it to show the steps in a Planning, Development, Testing and Deployment process for a new product, or to demonstrate where new starters are in their onboarding process.

The new Card Macro on Confluence Cloud offers one of the most visual ways to highlight content on a Confluence page. Use it to create a card containing an image, text and hyperlink on any page, calling out key information and encouraging users to engage with it. You can read all about this new release here.

Whatever stage you’re at with your Confluence wiki, Content Formatting Macros can help to improve how it looks and feels. If you’re looking to add design flair and encourage your team members to interact with pages and spaces, this could be the perfect solution. 

Best of all, you can try Content Formatting Macros for Confluence for free right now! So what’s stopping you? Click below to get started:

Get started with Content Formatting Macros for Confluence

A well-organised, carefully thought-out Confluence wiki can not only act as a company intranet, but also facilitate collaboration within your business

Enhance your Confluence wiki with Content Formatting Macros

Find out how Content Formatting Macros can help to enhance your Confluence wiki.

How to customise your Confluence wiki with Content Formatting Macros

Read about all the sessions and register for Team '21 here!

As usual, there are a lot of talks I would like to attend, but won't have the right timings for on the day, so I am going to have to be picky. 

This year, there are so many, I can not limit myself to the usual five or six!

So many wonderful talks, so few hours in a day.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Atlassian

Stewart Butterfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Slack

I don't usually highlight the keynotes, as they tend to speak for themselves, but this one stuck out this time, having three highly successful CEOs all making their name in collaboration tools.

I would like to hear how their perspectives have evolved alongside the tools they have been building, as well as how they think things will change, and how they might adapt to that change themselves.

Keynote: Conversation with Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO

Leah Ryder, Brand Marketing Sr. Team Lead, Atlassian

I am not a heavy user of shared Trello boards, using them mainly for myself, and when needing to share, usually reaching to the Jira that the people I'm sharing with are using.

I can see Trello having a lot of use in shared spaces and I'd like to see this one simply to steal the ideas.  The topic of remote teams is close to me as well, my team has been mostly remote for years before the pandemic, but we could be doing better at it, and I think Trello can help.

7 Trello workflows for building your team’s remote culture

I have carried a "not affecting me" attitude to this (COVID-19, Lockdown, etc) for a long time, but began to become conscious that digital health really matters after I started being responsible for running a team of other people.

Seeing how screen time was a problem for them, I became more aware that it could well be causing me problems too, so I'm keen to hear more about it and what might be able to help, both my people and myself.

Digital health: Staying sane and healthy in an online world

Monique van den Berg, Senior Manager, Community Engagement, Atlassian

Well, of course I want to see this one!  Not so much to learn about the Community, as a long-in-the-tooth leader in the Community, I have found and used a lot of help already.  And then contributed where I can.

But I don't know what it looks like from the outside.

And, yes, I'll be bringing my original "Warlock of Firetop Mountain" to re-read afterwards.

Choose your own adventure: Get involved with Atlassian Community

Cannon Lafferty, Senior Transformation Consultant, Adaptavist

Jennifer Eolin, Technical Consultant, Adaptavist

The part of Agile I have always seen problems with is doing it at scale.  Scale is not a matter of having a large number of teams all working in agile ways, it is about seeing the overall picture, making sure that the teams are working towards a common objective, explaining how they need to work together no matter what individual team goals might be, and, most importantly, getting the information visible to everyone so people can see and question everything as they need.

I've worked with Jira Align, but mostly around the team level and technical points, so I'm interested in what it can do at the higher levels.

Scaling DevOps strategies using Jira Align

Rachel Lin, Product Manager, Team Central, Atlassian

Mary Raleigh, Product Marketing Manager, Team Central, Atlassian

Communication is at the heart of getting anything done whenever there is more than one person involved, and it is an eternal problem.  As technology evolves, so do our communication problems.

So anything that might help with the current range of problems is of interest to me.

(I also have an instinctive dislike of spreadsheets - I've found that any spreadsheet with more than one person editing it, there's a very high chance it's wrong)

Introducing the Loop: A framework for predictable comms in an unpredictable world

Greg Warner, Senior Atlassian Administrator, Splunk

This one is something of a "cheat", as I have had a couple of chats with Greg about this project, mainly on specific details within it. 

I'd like to hear what he thinks the most important parts of it are for a wider audience!

What I wish I'd known: Moving Splunk’s 10,000 users to cloud

Ian Buchanan, Principle Partner Engineer, Atlassian

Patrick Debois, Director of Market Strategy, Snyk

Patrick Deuley, Sr. Product Manager, Ecosystem, Gitlab, Inc.

I've spent my career trying to make things better for people by trying to make machines talk to each other, and hence let the humans get on with the more interesting, less automate-able work.  That's not the only thing DevOps is for, of course, so I want to hear how this all fits in with the other elements of DevOps.

How an open approach to DevOps gives you the flexibility to adapt to anything

You can view the entire event overview for Team '21 here.

Are you going to be attending Team '21? Connect with us on social media @Adaptavist on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and use the hashtag #AtlassianTeam21 to let us know what's on your mind.

The talks Adaptavist Senior Consultant and Atlassian Community Champion Nic Brough won't be missing at this year's Atlassian event.

Atlassian Team '21: Talks I can't wait to see

The talks Adaptavist Senior Consultant and Atlassian Community Champion Nic Brough won't be missing at th...

Talks I most want to see at Atlassian Team '21

In this blog series, Heidi Araya, Agile Transformation Leader and creator of the Four Facets of Agility, unpacks the roadblockers inherent with agile transition and explains how our Four Facets of Agility help organisations to see agile differently. Previous posts have covered complexity thinking, people and leadership, and technical and cultural practices. Here, she explores the final facet: tools and automation.

The tools we choose should help organisations to achieve great things. They’re there to provide visibility into the pipeline of product delivery so teams and organisations can understand and improve based on what they’re seeing. And automation is vital too - agility is about automating what is possible to reduce risks and errors from manual work.

Organisations need to look at these components holistically, rather than each department leader making decisions independently and focusing simply on “their part”. And they need to continuously improve the tools and automations they have in place.

Conway’s Law states that we design systems that mirror our own communication structure. Without cross-company tools that foster clear, concise, and meaningful communication, the software an organisation produces will lack that same cohesion and fail to deliver what customers need. Adaptavist works with clients to audit and evaluate the tools and existing configurations for teams and workflows and, along with a cross-section of people in the organisation, align existing tooling and processes with the value stream. 

When we’re called in to assess a tooling set-up, we often find that people have no holistic view of what is actually going on inside the company, or how it actually delivers anything to customers. Perhaps there are many different tools being used by different roles (product managers use one tool; testers use another tool; and engineers another, for example); or short-lived project teams and multiple handoffs across different departments. Project teams are often based on the thinking that people can be assigned to multiple projects so they are fully allocated, and furthermore are easily swappable across teams, which is not congruent with reality.  

One team we worked with had a 12-column Scrum board. It included an engineer, peer code review, senior code review, and three kinds of QA testing, but there were still a high number of production incidents. They were even hiring a release manager to try to prevent things from being released to production in a bad state. Every time something went wrong, they added tools, processes, and people, rather than fixing the underlying problem (a lack of automated testing). No surprise - not only was this expensive - it didn’t solve their problems at all. 

When tools aren’t set up right, collaboration is negatively impacted. Teams need a holistic view of value delivery, clearly stated goals, and a vision for tooling solutions to help realise their full potential (but don’t make this into another waterfall project plan - it is important, above all, to start somewhere and iterate).

Effective tools also provide the information organisations need to make fact-based, strategic decisions. Problem is, often people don’t know what they should be measuring, how, or why. We look beyond standard tooling using ‘flow metrics’ – measuring the movement of value right to the customer to close the feedback loop – assessing cycle time, throughput, and time in status as well as other “healthy metrics” that can be used to help teams - and the enterprise - improve.

Even with the best agile intentions, poor tooling will curtail any noticeable benefits. Are your software products more complex than the development tools you’re using? Have you adopted SAFe and other scaled agile frameworks but can’t coordinate your value streams? Or are you struggling to marry up the work with your strategy or value delivery? If the answer to any of these is yes, you’re not alone. 

Good tools offer the benefits of agile development – helping teams improve collaboration, and providing transparency into enterprise initiatives. Beyond that, they provide insight outside the team level, offering visibility at scale for large enterprises. It is important that scaled agile tooling solutions are both flexible and pragmatic to meet the needs of organisations who want to leverage and track value across teams and programs. Scaled agile tooling should be able to help you achieve the following: 

Understand the delivery of end-to-end value to customers. 

Tie strategy to execution, so that your people understand the ‘why’ and feel like they’re working on things that matter.

Be able to plan online – with distributed teams now the norm, this is more important than ever. 

Make better decisions using real-time data.

If your tools are taking their toll on your productivity, scalability, and visibility, it might be time to call in the experts. Contact our experts to discover how transforming your tools can accelerate your agile transformation today.

Rather than agile being an empty word, naming these four aspects – complexity thinking, people and leadership, technical and cultural practices, and tools and automation – has helped us think differently about agile transitions. Now we have more meaningful, productive conversations about the needs and challenges faced by our clients. 

Our workshops and discovery sessions help the entire team identify next steps, instead of executives dictating them without context. Work is done incrementally, in a transparent way, with purpose and clearly defined outcomes. Input from everyone allows the right tools and processes to be introduced with maximum buy-in. And, as a result, culture improves. Arming teams with this wider knowledge promotes autonomy, increases productivity, raises engagement, and bakes in complexity thinking. 

These learnings aren’t just for our clients – we’re applying them at Adaptavist too. The ultimate goal of agile is to become a ‘deliberately developmental organisation’ – embracing learning, continuously addressing processes and tools, and analysing and adapting your culture and thinking as you go. As a result, you can expect improved well-being, an increase in team and organisational performance, and a workplace where it’s not just about getting the job done; it’s about caring how it gets done.

From developing an agile mindset to ensuring you have the right tools for the job, rewiring the way you work is complex and continuous. Adaptavist’s experts are here to help—just fill out this form and we'll get back to you.  

The tools we choose should help organisations to achieve great things. In the final part of our Facets of Agility series we take a look at the importance of tools in a successful agile transformation.

The four facets of agility, part 5: take the tools off auto-pilot

In the final part of our Facets of Agility series we take a look at the importance of tools in a successf...

When it comes to scaling agile and DevOps practices in large enterprises, there is no silver bullet. That said, there are a whole host of best practices you can follow to help you on the road to success. Piqued your interest? Well, we’ve got just the thing for you. 

On Wednesday April 28th—in an on-demand webinar as part of Atlassian Team 21—Adaptavist’s consultants, Cannon Lafferty & myself (Jennifer Eolin), are tackling the topic of scaling DevOps in a way that allows agile teams and IT to truly work together with organisational transparency. 

Using Atlassian’s portfolio tool, Jira Align, viewers will be able to see the impact of defining your organisation’s DevOps competencies as a lifecycle and mapping these competencies out on a product roadmap. This approach enables orgs to break down the traditional DevOps silo model.

Come along and join Cannon and I as we identify: 

Common roadblocks organisations face when scaling DevOps

New ways of organising and planning DevOps on your product roadmap

How transparency of DevOps work drives a growth & product mindset—the fuel for any organisation that truly wants to scale


You’ll find the session by registering for Atlassian Teams 21 and filtering by both ‘on-demand’ and ‘DevOps’.

We hope you enjoy it - as always please let us know your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you.

Jennifer believes in empowering organisations to make the "people, process, product" principle a reality. She regards 'process' as more than a document, but as the basis for an organisation's culture and future.

Cannon Lafferty - Senior Transformation Consultant

In 2019, Cannon joined Adaptavist, working with the Agile Transformation team to help implement large scale agile delivery projects. He's  worked with development organisations for 15 years to coordinate both business value delivery and enable software development maturity. 

How can you scale DevOps in a way that allows agile teams and IT to truly work together with organisational transparency? Join Adaptavist’s consultants, Cannon Lafferty & Jennifer Eolin on April 28th—in an on-demand webinar as part of Atlassian Team 21 to find out!

Scaling DevOps with Jira Align at Atlassian Team ‘21

How can you scale DevOps in a way that allows agile teams and IT to truly work together with organisation...

Slack has been instrumental in enabling people to work remotely, foster a sense of belonging with distributed teams, and keeping productivity high. You and your coworkers have screen fatigue, a year in, and showing a Pavlovian response to Slack’s notification sounds, with an attention span of 9 milliseconds. 

Instead of complaining, which we do because we’re human, why not act like the colibri that brought water drops one by one, and inspired a whole legion to fight the fire? Here are 9 pointers on how to make everybody’s work experience a bit more pleasant and look good in front of your coworkers.

Emojis can go a long way to indicate the tone of a message but of course, use these sparingly as people can easily misunderstand you for not being serious. Emoji reactions help foster a sense of community and are great at showing enthusiasm and positivity, especially with everyone working remotely. It’s easy to add custom emojis to your Slack, such as logos of your company, your products, and of the tools you use most often. You can even customise quick reactions.

In today’s remote world, the lack of body language has been replaced by over-exaggerated facial expressions over video calls. We can’t see our coworkers hanging out by the coffee machine or the water cooler (or the doughnut box). We can’t have impromptu hallway banter, nor hear others laughing out loud from the other side of the office anymore.

This makes it all the more important to over-communicate and compensates for the lack of visual cues. Keep in contact regularly, stay connected, keep some team spirit alive and make a conscious effort to keep each other informed. I’ve found turning on the webcam to be useful to set expectations for yourself; to get dressed (not stay in pyjamas) and be ready to go for the morning.

The call of the wild of the garden (and the fridge) are probably enough of a distraction when working from home; the last thing you want is the ding ding of your notifications all day too. You need to be able to focus every once in a while. 

With the whole world shifting to working remotely, this is a big change for those who were 100% office based before. We share our own experiences of how to best use Slack for remote teams.

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The four facets of agility, part 5: take the tools off auto-pilot

Scaling DevOps with Jira Align at Atlassian Team ‘21

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All blog posts
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