Workforce planning, but better: Optimise HR processes with Atlassian tools
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Workforce planning, but better: Optimise HR processes with Atlassian tools
Michael Rudenko
24 April 2025
10 min read
Michael Rudenko
24 April 2025
10 min read
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1. Streamline workforce planning process
2. Collaboration and communication between teams
3. Align workforce planning with strategic objectives
Workforce planning has evolved into a complex function involving much more than hiring people. Today, it demands doing everything necessary to ensure the organisation has access to the right talent, skills, and capacity to achieve both its current and future goals. According to a recent Korn Ferry report, over 85 million positions could go unfilled by 2030, making it imperative for HR teams to have a forward-looking stance on holistic workforce planning and management.
But here's the fact: looking into and ensuring top-notch workforce planning for the longer haul often becomes a logistical nightmare for most organisations. Without the right tools, keeping up with shifting business needs, tracking talent pipelines, and aligning workforce decisions with the overall company strategy doubles up as an uphill battle for most HR teams. Traditional methods of disjointed spreadsheets, relying on endless approval workflows, and battling misaligned hiring priorities don't help. Instead, they tend to bring down even the most well-intentioned units. This is where relying on Atlassian's system of work, combining business and technology, comes in handy.
Using Atlassian tools helps HR teams simplify workforce planning, improve collaboration across departments, and ensure every hiring decision supports long-term business success. Wondering how? In this blog, we'll share ways Atlassian tools can help HR teams transform workforce planning from a chaotic process into a strategic advantage.
How to leverage Atlassian tools to optimise workforce planning
Unlike common perception, Atlassian's tech tools, such as Jira, Confluence, and Loom, aren't just for IT project management. Instead, they can help improve work management by bringing together technology and business teams to speed up progress and boost team effectiveness. There are different ways in which HR teams can use these tools to improve and simplify their workforce-planning workflows. Let's go over some of them:
1. Streamline the overall workforce planning process
A solid workforce-planning strategy requires HR team members to track multiple moving parts, from hiring plans to internal mobility and skills development. These teams must ensure complete visibility into current and future workforce needs while keeping their decision-making workflows agile and data-driven. Without a structured system, managing the dynamic aspects can quickly become chaotic.
Using Atlassian tools can help overcome this chaos in the following ways:
- Jira: HR teams can use it to automate and create custom workflows that track workforce planning tasks, such as recruitment needs, role approvals, internal mobility, and onboarding timelines. Dashboards can provide real-time visibility into hiring pipelines, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
- Confluence: It can double up as a dynamic knowledge base to store workforce plans, hiring policies, organisational charts, and employee development roadmaps in a central location. This can make it easy for HR and leadership teams to access and update crucial information in real-time without digging through an endless archive of scattered files. Additionally, Confluence Whiteboards–with features like sticky notes, drawing tools, and templates–offer an interactive space for teams to brainstorm, plan, and visualise ideas collaboratively.
- Rovo can help HR teams make proactive, data-driven decisions using AI insights to highlight key workforce trends. Rovo can flag hiring bottlenecks, forecast future talent needs, and surface relevant workforce planning data. This can optimise hiring strategies and support better talent decisions.
An example of streamlining workforce planning using Atlassian tools:
Imagine a company that's growing quickly. Each department can submit its recruitment requests as Jira tickets and then move through the steps of organised approval and sourcing. Hiring managers can monitor real-time hiring progress, quickly resolving any bottlenecks. Meanwhile, Confluence can serve as a repository for hiring guidelines and job descriptions, ensuring all stakeholders are aligned. Teams can integrate Jira and Confluence to make sharing information seamless, ensuring everything runs smoothly without endless back and forth and tasks getting missed out in the process.
2. Facilitate smoother collaboration and communication between different teams.
Modern HR management doesn't operate in isolation. Proper workforce planning today requires input from various department heads, finance, and leadership. Relying on traditional approaches such as scattered email threads, spreadsheets, and unstructured meetings often leads to misalignment, slow decision-making, and lost context.
Using Atlassian tools can help to foster better collaboration in the following ways:
- Confluence: HR teams can use it as a single source of truth to centrally document their workforce-planning strategies, hiring goals, and policy updates. Maintaining an accessible intranet can simplify work by enabling stakeholders to review, comment, suggest changes, and track revisions. With all company information in a unified space, overcoming miscommunication or communication gaps can be easy.
- Jira Service Management: Using Jira Service Management can enable HR teams to ensure they receive all necessary information upfront and can track requests efficiently. Employees and managers across various teams can submit structured workforce-related requests, such as internal transfers, training needs, or role changes. HR teams can then act upon these and track progress in a structured manner.
- Loom: Tasks like explaining complex HR processes or sharing walkthroughs of workforce planning reports often become time-consuming. After all, these tasks can rarely be done via email. HR teams can save time on these by using Loom to record quick video updates instead of organising meetings. This can help reduce their meeting overload and ensure everyone is aligned.
An example of smoother collaboration using Atlassian tools:
Suppose an HR team wants improved transparency and alignment on talent development objectives. They can use Confluence to document succession planning strategies and career development frameworks in a central location. Leadership teams can review their plans anytime and provide input directly in Confluence. Furthermore, using Loom videos can make explaining HR policies or workforce change plans easier without sitting through long meetings.
3. Align workforce planning with overall strategic objectives.
Today, workforce planning cannot be reactive. Instead, a proactive strategy must align hiring and resource decisions with long-term business goals—this is also emphasised in Atlassian Teamwork Collection. Without this, HR efforts can become disconnected from organisational priorities, leading to misallocated resources, talent shortages, or overstaffing in the wrong areas.
Atlassian tools can help align planning with strategic objectives in the following ways:
- Jira: Using Jira can empower HR teams to link workforce planning tasks directly to strategic business objectives. For example, it can help map hiring initiatives to expansion goals, ensuring resources are allocated to the right regions and departments.
- Confluence: Confluence can act as a long-term repository for workforce plans. Using it can allow HR and leadership teams to track progress, adjust priorities, and maintain strategic alignment. Updating it regularly can ensure that workforce planning remains dynamic rather than static.
- Advanced Roadmaps in Jira: Jira advanced roadmaps can provide a high-level view of workforce initiatives. They can also make planning long-term talent needs, skills development, and succession across multiple teams much more manageable.
An example of improved strategic alignment using Atlassian tools: Suppose a company is planning international expansion. The HR team is working on a roadmap that outlines key workforce initiatives, such as local talent hiring, compliance checks, and cultural training programs. They can use Jira to track their workforce readiness across these fronts. These updates can then be documented in Confluence, ensuring their leadership fully sees the workforce readiness plan.
Are you inspired to turn your workforce planning processes into structured, data-driven, strategic operations?
Effective workforce planning is key to building a resilient, future-ready organisation. By leveraging Atlassian tools, you can move beyond outdated processes and embrace a structured, collaborative, and strategic approach to workforce management. Remember, this isn't just about adopting new tools but transforming your HR processes into well-organised, insight-driven, and goal-oriented operations.
If you want to improve workforce planning, enhance efficiency, and align talent strategies with business goals, Atlassian tools paired with expert guidance from Adaptavist can help.
Do you want to learn more about how Atlassian tools can help HR teams transform workforce planning and implement it, too? Contact us today for tailored solutions that fit your organisation's needs.
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.
Work management
Atlassian