Work management as a practice is gaining momentum. This time last year, it was an emerging topic. It wasn't a widely used term, and its broad scope covered achieving organisational objectives across teams and stakeholders, where teams primarily worked in silos. This year at Atlassian's Team '24 conference, it took centre stage with many major announcements about new developments specifically designed to support better ways of working and driving productivity within teams but essentially, between teams.
This year's event unveiled a series of groundbreaking announcements that will redefine how teams collaborate, manage projects, and drive productivity across the whole organisation.
From innovative software updates to powerful new tools, the announcements made at Team '24 promise to enhance the capabilities of Atlassian's suite of products, further empowering users to reach their goals.
In the Founders Keynote, Atlassian Co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes described the foundations of teamwork as Jira, Confluence, and Loom.
Join us as we delve into the highlights of these three tools and explore how they, along with some of the latest developments, could transform our work landscape.
1. Jira Work Management combines with Jira Software to become Jira
Hailed as the 'next era of Jira,' Jira Work Management (JWM) and Jira Software have merged to become a single platform known as Jira.
So, what does this mean for work management? Previously, the two tools had specific audiences. However, this change aims to simplify collaboration and teamwork across business and technical teams and make it easier for knowledge workers to coordinate in all departments. The idea is that every team across an organisation can align their goals and priorities and track their work together from one place rather than across multiple tools.
New features within Jira will make it more appealing to business users:
- Goals–add to any project or task for visibility across teams and show associated work to keep teams aligned.
- Plans–Jira Plans (previously known as Advanced Roadmaps) will offer new ways of displaying work, including calendar and summary, making viewing metrics at a glance easier.
- List view–this was previously only available in JWM but is now across all of Jira. It offers a spreadsheet-style format, enabling a more visual approach to work management.
- Atlassian Intelligence (more details later in this blog): While this section covers a wide range of features, notable ones related to work management include intelligent suggestions for breaking work into bite-sized pieces and turning epics into issues or issues into sub-tasks.
Crucially, these changes increase focus and reduce context-switching by bringing everything together.
2. Confluence improvements
Shared knowledge ensures everyone gets the information they need to do their job well. Where goals are now prevalent across Jira for all users, Confluence is where users can find and create shared knowledge.
There are also some exciting new features to support knowledge workers:
- Online whiteboards–This new feature is clever. In addition to being an online visual brainstorming tool, it offers templates and the ability to vote on favourite concepts, collate the results and then turn the ideas into actions in Jira. It can also analyse feedback from within Jira and Confluence to start the brainstorming.
- AI features to help with automation, document summaries and more (see AI section below)
- Confluence databases and smart links: This service offers templated pages and smart links to add any third-party link to the Confluence navigation.
3. Getting to know Loom
If you're unfamiliar with the term' asynchronous collaboration' (also shortened to 'async collaboration' or described as working 'async'), it means working with colleagues on your schedule. Atlassian acquired Loom in October 2023, and it is now a key component of its work management toolkit.
Distributed or remote working is a reality in modern terms, so more work is moving to asynchronous. Working across time zones and engaging with your teammates is easier without being available in real-time, and that's what Loom, a video messaging tool, is used for.
Loom helps by:
- Supporting a remote culture to build stronger connections between teams
- Replacing meetings to increase focus time
- Automatically generates a video transcript and edits the video to remove hesitation sounds or gaps so it is immediately usable.
- Creating personalised videos based on variables and useful integrations with other tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce.
4. New AI capabilities and a new product, Rovo
Atlassian Intelligence, the company's AI-powered features, have become familiar across tools such as Jira and Confluence over the past year. They offer smarter suggestions, help automate tasks, and provide insights that can improve productivity within these tools and help save you time.
At Team '24, Atlassian introduced Atlassian Rovo, billed as the next stage in human-AI collaboration. Rovo focuses on turning information into action. A select group of customers can now access the tool, and Atlassian invites the rest to join the waitlist. Contact us if you want our team to help you navigate the waitlist application process.
We will explore Rovo in-depth as it rolls out (it's worthy of its own blog). For now, here's a summary of the key features that will support better work management:
- Search across everything—Rovo allows users to search across data, tools, platforms, and third-party apps to find relevant and complementary information.
- 'Teamwork graph'–this tool pulls together data from your connected tools to provide a view of your company's goals, knowledge, teams and work. It continues to expand as you add to it, building its knowledge to help you.
- Rovo Agents–we think this one is particularly exciting. Rovo Agents are virtual teammates and can work with us to bring specialised knowledge and skills to our processes.
Atlassian's Team '24 brought many new announcements, and this blog highlights some exciting work management-related developments. Get in touch to chat about what these announcements could mean for your team or for more information about anything you've read.
