Atlassian's Teamwork Foundations: Three pillars for effective collaboration
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Atlassian's Teamwork Foundations: Three pillars for effective collaboration
Michael Rudenko
1 April 2025
11 min read
Michael Rudenko
1 April 2025
11 min read
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Pillar 1: Align work to goals
Pillar 2: Unleash organisational knowledge
Pillar 3: Plan and track work cross-functionally
Effective teamwork and collaboration underpin successful organisations that recognise their business benefits and the value of strategically important project portfolios. Teams often struggle with inefficiencies, misalignment, and duplicated efforts without clear communication, structured workflows, and shared knowledge.
Work management looks at how we get work done and the tools our teams use daily. Atlassian's System of Work philosophy describes how tech-driven organisations should work, connecting technology and business teams to accelerate progress and maximise team impact. This framework suggests three foundational pillars–Teamwork Foundations—that should shape your work management strategy for faster time to value, more engaged and happier teams and higher ROI.
- Align work to goals
- Unleash organisational knowledge
- Plan and track work cross-functionally
When implemented well, every organisation and team member will be empowered to be effective, successful, and consistent across the business.
In this blog, we'll explore these pillars and explain how using Atlassian's team-focused tools, Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo, in conjunction with these concepts, can help enhance productivity, transparency, and knowledge sharing across your organisation.
Pillar 1: Align work to goals
Firstly, you need to know your goals at every level–for every individual, team, department, and executive–and then they must be shared, consistent, and visible for an organisation to work towards its desired outcomes. They should also form a part of your governance framework and be regularly reviewed and challenged to ensure they remain consistent with the goals of the business and team.
It's natural for teams to feel overwhelmed by an ever-growing list of tasks–mainly when working remotely and async. Creating a culture of alignment offers teams a clear connection between their daily work and broader organisational objectives, tackling that information overload. Without this clarity, team members risk working in silos, duplicating efforts, and spending more time than necessary on low-impact tasks. The lack of alignment can also add to miscommunication, missed deadlines, and projects failing to deliver real business value, coupled with lowered team morale.
By strategically linking every project, task, and initiative to overarching goals, teams can operate with greater focus, accountability, and motivation. They can understand their actions and why they matter, building a sense of purpose and ownership. Enabling this clarity can drive better decision-making, resource allocation, and prioritisation. As a result, teams can redirect time and effort towards work that genuinely impacts the common goals.
How Atlassian tools can simplify aligning work to goals
- Using Jira lends a structured workflow and enables linking every task to overarching goals, helping to ensure transparency and traceability, ensuring different teams stay on course, and preventing them from working in isolation.
- Confluence is a central knowledge hub that lets teams document and align on company objectives, roadmaps, and strategies. The shared space helps teams align better on priorities and easily track progress toward key goals.
- Rovo enhances information visibility using AI-driven insights. It helps teams focus on key priorities and quickly retrieve relevant information. Using it makes it easy for everyone to focus on what truly matters rather than getting lost in a stream of irrelevant, time-consuming tasks.
In practice
When tasks don't explicitly link to company priorities, developers may work on enhancements that don't align with the business's strategic direction. By leveraging Atlassian tools, their team can ensure better alignment.
- With Jira, technical teams can create epics linked to their company's quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs). Every user story and sprint task can directly contribute to the larger business goal while being tracked via Jira's built-in reporting capabilities.
- Teams can use Confluence to document key decisions, timelines, and dependencies, ensuring transparency across the board. Knowledge wikis become an integral part of your toolchain.
- Rovo's AI-powered recommendations can help team members quickly find relevant information, ensuring they don't waste time searching for scattered updates. It learns with you and adapts as it grows with you.
By structuring work this way, teams can achieve precise alignment with overarching goals and ensure everyone understands and appreciates how their contributions impact business success.
Pillar 2: Unleash organisational knowledge
Knowledge is one of the most valuable assets within any organisation. Yet, too often, critical information gets lost in scattered emails, outdated documents, or buried in the minds of employees who move on to other roles. Suppose you aren't able to share insights about your work or find work that is relevant to you. In that case, teams can waste valuable time searching for answers, repeating mistakes, and duplicating work, making it difficult to be efficient and move quickly. This produces frustration and lowers engagement.
Organisations can empower their teams to work more efficiently, make informed decisions, and drive continuous improvement by prioritising knowledge sharing. When employees can easily access and contribute to a shared knowledge base, they spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time focusing on strategic initiatives.
How Atlassian tools can make it simple to unleash organisational knowledge
- Confluence can serve as a living knowledge base where teams document best practices, processes, and project updates in a central location, ensuring information is readily available for new and existing employees.
- Loom can allow teams to create quick, digestible video explainers, enabling visual learning, reducing the need for repetitive, lengthy meetings, and saving time.
- Rovo can make it accessible to leverage AI to bring up the correct information at the right time, making knowledge retrieval seamless and efficient.
In practice
When new hires to a company need to be quickly onboarded, they might struggle to find relevant documentation without a structured knowledge-sharing system, rely on colleagues for guidance, or miss out on critical insights from past projects. Instead of bombarding colleagues with questions, they could access the company's Confluence space to find documented onboarding materials, product guides, and Loom videos explaining key processes. Rovo's AI-powered search can help them locate relevant documents instantly, significantly reducing their learning curve without disrupting the work of fellow employees.
Pillar 3: Plan and track work cross-functionally
The tools we choose to plan and track work is a critical decision. You need visibility of who is assigned work, the expected deliverables, how you will achieve them, and the details of subtasks that support those bigger goals. Smooth collaboration doesn't happen in silos. The most successful projects require teams from different functions, such as engineering, marketing, sales, and operations, to work together harmoniously. If this coordination is poor, teams face bottlenecks, misaligned priorities, and duplicated efforts. A lack of visibility across functions also results in wasted resources, delays, and an overall lack of accountability.
Implementing cross-functional planning ensures that work flows smoothly across teams, reducing friction and increasing efficiency. When organisations establish transparent processes for collaboration, teams can anticipate dependencies, manage workloads effectively, and adapt to changes without confusion. Therefore, transparent planning and tracking help create a shared understanding of who is responsible for what, preventing misalignment and enabling teams to move forward confidently.
How Atlassian tools can facilitate cross-functional planning
- Jira integrates with Confluence to enable real-time collaboration and knowledge sharing across business and technology teams, facilitating communication and feedback on shared project documentation.
- Confluence enables cross-functional teams to collaborate easily over shared documentation, eliminating knowledge gaps and misalignment and ensuring everyone works from the same playbook. You can use Confluence to document key project details, ensuring all teams can access up-to-date information from a single source of truth.
- Loom enhances asynchronous communication, allowing teams in different time zones to share updates, explanations, and walkthroughs in video format rather than engaging in lengthy meetings or endless email threads. You can record quick status updates and share them in Confluence or Slack to keep everyone informed without disruptive productivity.
Practical example
Suppose the marketing team is launching a campaign for a new product feature. The team must collaborate with the product and sales teams to ensure messaging aligns with the product roadmap and customer feedback. Without structured cross-functional planning, these teams might struggle to stay in sync, leading to delays and inconsistent messaging.
In this scenario, Jira can help track tasks across departments, ensuring that marketing initiatives align with product development timelines. Confluence can store campaign briefs and content calendars, providing a centralised place for all teams to reference the latest updates. Loom videos give quick updates on shifting priorities, helping teams adjust without lengthy back-and-forth. With this setup, it can be easy to ensure that every team stays informed and aligned without constant check-ins.
Are you inspired to take your collaboration game a notch higher?
Effective collaboration isn't just about working together but working smarter. By aligning work with goals, ensuring consistent planning across teams, and unlocking organisational knowledge lies the potential to eliminate inefficiencies and build an environment where teams thrive.
Using Atlassian's Teamwork Foundations framework, supported by tools like Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo, can provide the structure and visibility your teams need to stay aligned, collaborate effectively, and drive results.
Want to take the following steps to improve your teamwork? Explore how Adaptavist can help you implement these principles using Atlassian's AI tools in your organisation.
Written by
Head of Consulting EMEA
After retiring from the Royal Army Dental Corps, Michael led major projects for the NHS and the London 2012 Olympics. With 30+ year's experience, he fosters trust, collaboration, and efficiency, and excels in complex agile, DevOps, and work management settings.
Atlassian
Work management