Thoughts on some New Collaboration Tools @ B&J

Over the last year, we’ve adopted some new tools here at B&J. Specifically, Confluence and Jira, by Atlassian. Collaboration tools like Confluence and Jira get adopted quickly when:

They start with a small group of enthusiastic adopters who get results.

Many companies make the mistake of waiting for a corporate-wide initiative to roll out a tool and then get paralyzed by logistics, training, and the general rollout. On the other hand, project teams with small budgets and huge problems will find solutions and test them under the radar at little cost. Jira’s biggest internal champion has been our Quality Manager, who had never seen Jira until we did a test rollout. It quickly became critical to his workflow and he began vocally supporting the adoption of it by other technical staff and other departments for one simple reason: It makes his job easier by providing clear tracking and communication across teams and projects.

Their efforts are recognized at the top. Top-down rollouts seldom work smoothly, but grassroots adoptions supported by senior management have a much better chance of thriving. If front line staff are willing to use a tool that keeps them from meeting, it must have its charms. In particular, they are using it for something that is highly underrated — posting across project teams, and even departments, so that they’re not hunting for email addresses or trying to figure out who’s on what project. The floors are only separated by a stairwell, but the minutes saved in travel and locating people can be better spent writing a test harness or getting started on tomorrow’s QA milestone.