Atlassian’s Jira Work Management encourages team collaboration

At its Team21 conference today, Atlassian unveiled Jira Work Management, a new product built specifically for enterprise teams. The next generation of Jira Core, Jira Work Management is described as a platform that enables marketing, HR, finance, and design employees to connect with their technical counterparts and work together more efficiently.

As the pace of change increases, new ways of working are forcing teams to become more agile. Gartner reports that 74% of companies plan to shift some of their employees to remote working permanently. But more than half of remote employees say they feel disconnected from in-office employees, according to an Owl Labs survey, highlighting remote work challenges that must be overcome.

With Jira Work Management, which was first announced in March, Atlassian aims to enable business customers to take advantage of the capabilities native to its Jira product family. The architecture that Jira Work Management shares with Jira Software and Jira Service Management lets data flow between projects within organizations. This means a request for a website update can pass through designers using Jira Work Management, as well as developers using Jira Software, for example.

Above: Atlassian Jira Work Management’s calendar view.

Image Credit: Atlassian

“Jira Work Management combines cutting-edge work management capabilities with the power and customizability of Jira to create a new standard for business teams managing projects,” Atlassian product marketing head Chase Wilson said in a blog post. “This is the first Jira built for business teams, by business teams. We crafted this new Jira experience directly with customer design partners of all sizes and industries, as well as internal Atlassian teams of every type — including our own Jira Work Management teams.”

Enabling cross-team collaboration

Tasks from teams and projects in Jira Work Management can be linked together to reveal dependencies and connections. These links support custom names, allowing employees to create dashboards that report on organization-wide progress. Users can choose from over 35 options, including workload, heat map, filters, and charts, or bring in data with direct integrations.

Jira Work Management offers a number of features, including lists, a calendar, and a board that displays tasks from one or more projects. The platform’s timeline feature shows tasks with assignees and statuses, while its forms creator, which is available to licensed Jira Cloud users, lets employees create forms with a drag-and-drop interface.

Above: The timeline view in Jira Work Management.

Image Credit: Atlassian

Beyond this, Jira Work Management offers templates of industry-researched workflows and configurations, each with custom issue types, workflows, and fields. Teams see tasks and issues such as “asset” (in design or marketing use cases) and “candidate” (in recruiting use cases) instead of “stories” and “bugs” (software development). And in place of software-specific functionalities like code, backlog, components, and releases, the left navigation menu in the platform highlights views, forms, and a summary tab for insights.

Jira Work Management also offers free automation rules and actions within projects. Teams can select premade rules from a business automation library or create rules for use cases and departments.

Atlassian says all of the features are available for Jira Work Management project on every instance, across every pricing edition — including the free plan. The company adds that over the next six months, Jira Work Management will gain improvements to all of its views, optimized reporting functionality, approvals for sign-off, and new collaboration features.