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Confluence Knowledgebase Integration

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Welcome to the Jira for Designers series brought to you by Design at Scale™ – Academy. In a previous article, we discussed Sprint for Designers(↘︎Link) and how best to run your Sprint for designers using Atlassian Jira Board. This article will take our exploration into a slightly different place outside of management. The place is called Atlassian – Confluence(↘︎Link), and it helps us to define something we refer to as a knowledgebase. Knowledgebase is the baseline for all the project-related information that serves the creation of different types of documentation and further design guidelines(↘︎Link).   

Jira for Designers: Jira is for tasks

Jira is for tasks

In the previous three articles, we have explored Atlassian’s Jira Kanban(↘︎Link), Scrum(↘︎Link), and Sprint(↘︎Link). This allowed us to see where these tasks overlap, what role they play and how best they contribute to the overall delivery.
If we look closely at the ticket, we will see that there are several things that define the ticket. Whether it is a story or a task, we have the ability to attach external pieces of information. Some of the Agile Coaches(↘︎Link) call it the evidence. In the design world, we relate to them as assets – let alone design assets. 

Definition

On the definition side, we’ll have Confluence or any form of Wiki, especially when the HLR’s(↘︎Link) or UAC's(↘︎Link) requirements are identical for the set of features. They do not have to be repeated all the time. 

Delivery 

On the delivery end, the Figma(↘︎Link) plays a vital role these days. However, we often see that the visual file is no longer sufficient for our development colleagues. Therefore, Confluence(↘︎Link) is coming back as an extension of our visual file, with a powered-by combo of BitBucket(↘︎Link) or GitHub(↘︎Link) for Github lovers.

Jira for Designers: Confluence for the knowledge

Confluence for knowledge.

You have most certainly been in a situation where you are trying to gather basic information about the project, proposition, service, or function. Someone somewhere had already seen it, but it was a while ago or far, far away. Fun aside, we humans are messy; it’s not deliberate or thought. It’s the way it is.

Fun fact 

Two people in the company of ten outworks the rest by 300%. 

This way, if every person in the company is organised, we can save two people's sanity, and the rest of us can go home at 2 PM to spend time with our loved ones. This brings us to shared knowledge and the knowledge base. The knowledgebase is not a documentation or guide or any other fictive or partial deliverables. It's a base where everyone goes for information. If crafted and automated properly, it will become the backbone of your entire business. 

Why the Box(↘︎Link), Sharepoint(↘︎Link), Google Drive(↘︎Link) and many other drive solutions do not work and why Confluence(↘︎Link), Notion(↘︎Link) and its alternatives would? Because they act as a Wiki, also known as Wikipedia(↘︎Link). This way, the team has a very simple yet powerful tool to summarise all possible documents of knowledge in one place – knowledgebase before they are properly used in the context of a specific delivery.

Jira for Designers: Jira on the Top

Jira on the top

Atlassian Jira(↘︎Link) allows all parties access to knowledgebase and prevents them from losing the information once the ticket is delivered. Simply because it disappears from the board. Experienced Jira users and some development teams would not have this problem. That is why the majority of designers struggle to navigate the complex setting of Jira when they join pure development teams. 

However, through hundreds of iterations, I have found that the teams that predominantly use Jira without counterparts Confluence and BitBucket usually minimise the impact of the proposition bu 30-40%. Connecting Jira with Confluence allows the product team(↘︎Link) to synchronise tasks(↘︎Link), documentation and deployment information(↘︎Link) in one place. This place has far too many shapes and forms. Some confluence pages and hubs are so complex they eventually become the dump yard of all unsolicited documents that no one really needs. Let alone no one uses them for day-to-day decision-making.
Our 20+ years of experience with Atlassian products allowed us to strengthen our knowledge of small, medium and large teams. Equally serving products, services and design system teams. The following structure can be simply explained as 3x3.    

Jira for Designers: 3x3

3x3

Regardless of the organisation type, all businesses generally form their product development into three pillars: business, design, and development. Usually, they work in synergy and fully support cross-discipline deliverables and building the value proposition for the business.
Unfortunately, the diversity of these departments and their selection of tools, including remote communications, led to the greater disparity of our resources. Our knowledge, which we had previously shared through the day-to-day engagement routine(↘︎Link), slowly disappeared from the remote businesses.
It took close to a decade for the need and true recognition to solidify knowledgebase – the source of truth is more valuable than the technology we execute our designs. At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we see the rise of centralised documentation, which again fulfils the knowledge base of teams of all shapes and sizes. What remained the same was the improved bulletproof structures.

Jira for Designers: Business

Business 

Let’s begin with business, shall we? No business, no organisation, no design function, do not share any information without purpose. As the internal coms define the success of any organisation, we always include this section where we refer to a simple and unified way of engagement, processes, contacts and agreement on how, where and when we engage with our colleagues, such as the Hello Section.
Whether we are in one location or a fully remote team, the Business Section brings all the briefs, contracts, legal documents, roadmaps, planning, and other business-related documentation in one place. This way, all Jira tickets can be lined up with the appropriate job codes/brief or simply OKRs and KPIs. Simplifying Jira's description and making the workflow separate into two
a/ management
b/ resources.
And finally, the Research Section – which gained more presence in the last 7-8 years, was packaged as UXR. Sadly, the majority of research reports are still in PPTs, Keynotes and Excell sheets. No wonder Designers and developers on the front line do not really improve the ROI if they do not even know what impact it makes on their customers. In summary, the business pillar has the following sections:   

DaS™ – Hello(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Business(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Research(↘︎Link)
A detailed description is under the links to separate sections.

Jira for Designers: Design

Design

Design and designers hate documenting; there are very few exceptions of designers who love to design 50% of their time and 50% spend on communicating design. That would be roughly the average.
The reality is that 9 out of 10 design businesses operate as pixel factories, and there is no sense of ownership, IP or even productisation of the know-how. This brings us to the three most undervalued and impactful pieces of information for designers: content, experience, and design.
The Content  Section drives everything from the actual content, tone of voice, copy guidelines, messaging, communication and engagement strategy to an actual guide for how the business represents itself in the media. All of it can be linked to appropriate tickets without replication of one line of the content.
This brings us to the Experience Section mostly scattered on a variety of whiteboards and documents talking about content hierarchy, content strategy and content structure. All are connected by the personas, mental and navigational models and inevitably, information architecture. By introducing the Confluence for Experience discipline, we have everything in one place. More importantly, all these decisions and agreements were linked together, empowering us to make an informed decision – simply a miracle. 

That is equally true for the Design Section. In all fairness, we have recorded all our decisions from meetings and workshops and translated them into a simple document page with few images. That grew over a period of time into a Design System with comprehensive documentation. It’s fascinating how this thing gets developed and empowered when the users recognise its value.
In summary, the design pillar  has the following sections: 

DaS™ – Content(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Experience(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Design(↘︎Link)

Jira for Designers: Development

Development 

This is almost carrying a wood into the woods, so to speak. The development team knows the documentation, and the majority of their work is redistributed over these three sections – Development, Release and Integration. 

Leaving no one behind in terms of what deployment and changes they using alongside release notes and integration parameters that are necessary for the definition of API or other internal or external calls. 

In summary, the development pillar has the following sections: 

DaS™ – Development(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Release(↘︎Link)
DaS™ – Integration(↘︎Link)

All the above has been detailed in the Deasign at Scale™ – GRID Magazine Operations(↘︎Link), where you can grab your free copy.

Happy scaling through design!

Hey, I’m Jiri Mocicka.
London-based Design Director, Trusted Advisor and Author of
Design at Scale™. The method that empowers individuals to shape the future organisation through design.
If you have a question, join our Community and reach out to like-minded individuals who scale design propositions. An online Academy can help you to find your feed in teams of 01, 10, and 100, supported by Grid Magazine and Supply section, where we weekly bring more insights on how to become a design leader in your organisation

Tagged: 3x3 · Business · Confluence · Definition · Delivery · Design · Development · Integration · Jira · Knowlwdgebase
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