Atlassian Team ’22 was back in person in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (April 6th and 7th). There was also a robust virtual experience available worldwide. “Team ’22 offered a great opportunity to connect with people, get first-hand contact with amazing products, share experiences about digital transformation and open work practices for all teams.”  Marcio Silveira, e-Core CEO and co-founder said. “Nothing substitutes for the opportunity to be face-to-face with other people. It reminds us of how the world was before the pandemic.”

Conference tracks included: 1. Agile and DevOps, 2. ITSM, 3. Teamwork Culture and Open Work Management.

1. For Agile and DevOps Atlassian tools power collaboration between software teams and the rest of the organization. The result is better planning, faster development, and higher quality products.

2. For IT Service Management (ITSM), IT teams play a larger role than ever. Atlassian helps them work closely with software and operations teams to resolve incidents faster and keep services operational, as well as respond quickly to internal requests for IT support.

3. For Work Management for All, Atlassian is the workflow engine for team collaboration, allowing any team to organize, discuss, and complete work together.

More detail about all four new products is described at the end. But first, like the conference, we should review the motivation for these innovations.

New Help for Your Never-Ending Digital Journey

Atlassian went right at the challenges of remote work by distributed teams, amplified by the pandemic. Their solution?  “Work differently together.” To accomplish this, the company unveiled two new collaboration tools: Atlas and Compass. These can be applied broadly across any department in any enterprise to help teams perform better. For developers, Atlassian announced two new products: Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics.

“Every organization is born digital or transforming to digital.”

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian Co-founder and CEO

Silveira explained how e-Core supports the digital journey of businesses with Atlassian and other solutions. “Business teams are heavy users of technology, but they do not necessarily know how these connections work. How can e-Core help? We have tools that support connections across those different areas. Atlassian suite is a great tool to support a new way of working. But you have to be a specialist in how to integrate those tools with other existing systems.”

“That’s the digital journey that e-Core supports for its clients,” Silveira said. “We support companies from the moment they consider revisiting their business processes, better understanding how they’re going to solve their business process, evaluating their different needs, and then implementing a solution. We can create and support those solutions, be it third-party solutions or customized ones. Then we can help support those solutions as an on-going process.”

“Business people are being empowered to leverage solutions that may be cataloged or curated by software and IT teams,” he added. “But the decision makers are more and more at the edges of the organizations. They are the ones really driving the adoption of these tools.”

No Matter Where or How You Work, Atlassian is Coming for You

During the conference, Atlassian made no secret of its strategy to address the whole business enterprise, not just software development. “Our mission is to unleash the potential of every team,” one of their presentations read, “Ultimately, we aspire to serve the 1 billion knowledge workers around the globe, all of whom are looking for better ways to work.”

There is an explosion of Software as a Service (SaaS) tools in almost every company. According to a report from Forrester, 78% of companies with more than 1,000 employees have multiple toolchains. Anu Bharadwaj, VP of product at Atlassian, noted that companies with 2,000 employees or more, on average use 187 SaaS apps. A key goal of the new products Atlassian announced at the conference was gaining a handle on “application sprawl.”

New products Atlas and Compass empower business workers with digital tools, no matter their department or function in the enterprise. The new tools respond to upper management requirements with powerful reporting and collaboration capabilities.

“Nowadays, business leaders are engaging with the technology mindset from the start. They are procuring solutions that digitalize their business systems and processes,” e-Core’s Silveira said. “Atlassian wants to make sure they are the platform that connects all those SaaS environments. It’s really serving as a hub for companies to get work done. ‘Work management for all’ is about how you structure your workflows and get work done through different departments.”

“If you think about software development teams, you count on solutions like Jira and Bitbucket, products that are very centered and focused on that key market. But that is not disconnected from the rest of the organization. It connects with IT on the ITSM side. Atlassian has this underlying focus of getting to the enterprise accounts supporting not only software and IT teams but also business teams. To my mind, that was the key theme crystallized in the sessions,”

Marcio Silveira, e-Core CEO

Changing Work Culture Inspires Atlassian Tools

Atlassian’s Farquhar titled his keynote presentation after a quote from famous industrialist Peter Drucker. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Farquhar acknowledged, “Humankind everywhere is grappling with change. Culture becomes the single differentiator in how companies will succeed or how spectacularly they will fail.”

Many companies, “snuff the joy out of work,” Farquhar continued. Companies need to find the right balance between autonomy and alignment. Teams need a shared understanding of the what, why, who and how of their work. “This is hard for most organizations,” he said. If you’re scaling fast. If you’re digitally transforming. This can be especially frustrating, he added.

He described how over the past two years, Atlassian’s own workplace dramatically changed. Over one-quarter of Atlassian’s globally live more than two hours away from an Atlassian office. “We are finding amazing people no matter where they live,” Farquhar said. “As work changes, we change with it.”

Atlassian Team ’22 emphasized the importance of culture to work and team performance by ending the conference with a presentation by Jay Shetty, #1 New York Times best-selling author, podcaster, purpose coach and former monk.

“We have this big divide between our human life and our work life,” Shetty said. “When we merge away these false boundaries . . . we are able to live deeper and more fulfilling lives.” His keynote was entitled, “How connected thinkers will build the future.”

Shetty described four work mindsets, suggesting a “connected thinker” will have all four. First was the community mindset. He advocated broader teams and collaboration “If we can ask a more diverse group of people about every idea we have, that will give us a stronger idea.”

Second was a coach mindset. Shetty described the skill of, like a good sports coach, being able to know how to incentivize and communicate in someone else’s language, not your own. “Recognize everyone else’s power place,” he said.

Third was the child mindset. Shetty defined it as, “When we learn to be childlike, not childish, we get a fresh pair of eyes.” This doesn’t apply only to age, but also inexperience, he added.

Fourth was the coder mindset. Coders don’t see a difference between the digital and physical world, Shetty suggested. It’s the ability to look outside the commonly held myth.

In conclusion, he connected the most important skills of a connected thinker with each of the corresponding mindsets: complex problem solving = community mindset, critical thinking = coder mindset, creativity = child mindset, and people management = coach mindset.

He concluded that it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters what you think about what you do.

“When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”

Wayne Dyer, motivational speaker and self-help author

If you want to learn more about the conference online sessions, Atlassian made a few of them available on-demand. If all that seems “too deep,” the exciting news from Atlassian Team ’22 is that new tools are coming to facilitate just the kind of work and relationships teams need to be more productive, to deliver faster and better.

Atlassian Product Announcements

Here’s a brief synopsis of the four significant product announcements at Atlassian Team ’22. For advice on what these mean to your specific operation, contact e-Core to schedule an appointment with one of e-Core’s experienced consultants. We are a Cloud Specialized Atlassian Solution Partner Enterprise, and our mission is to connect people and technology to build a better future together.

Atlas

Atlassian’s Farquhar emphasized that workers in every part of a business need a shared understanding of the what, why, who and how of their work. And they need to know how their efforts connect with everyone else’s to accomplish business goals and objectives. For this to work, “there is no purpose-built solution for organizations, until now,” he said. “Atlas.”

Atlas is a new network directory. It pairs 280-character project updates with a smart directory. It is applied in individual teams and across teams. It answers the questions and keeps everyone in sync. “Atlas brings together people, goals and communications; making work as easy to follow as a Twitter feed,” Farquhar said. “You get all of the signals and none of the noise.”

It offers the ability to set and track goals at every level, from individuals to teams to the entire company, he explained. Product reporting is accomplished through prompted Tweet-sized updates every week. By default, Atlas asks teams to post weekly updates on their work and update their goals every month. These communications can include text, videos, images and GIFs.

Users create a personalized profile of their projects and goals. Other employees can see their core work and objectives. Users choose channels of the projects they wish to follow. You can also create team profiles.

Importantly, Atlas allows this connection and collaboration, regardless of the software tools individual workers use.

Sherif Mansour, Atlassian distinguished product manager, said Atlas was tested, and is in use by, companies including Warby Parker, Canva and LaunchDarkly. As more companies are experiencing, different departments may use different tools, DevOps on Jira, HR on Trello, Sales on Slack, etc. With Atlas, “it actually doesn’t matter anymore, because they all say what they are working on, how it’s connected to the other piece of work and they all have a common vocabulary,” Mansour said. “It replaces a crap ton of status meetings that nobody likes,” Mansour added. (Yes, he said it that way.)

Joff Redfern, Atlassian head of all teams, suggested, “Status meetings were great when they were small. But they simply don’t scale. Atlas eliminates the need to meet live. Everyone can be informed from the lens that is most appropriate for them.”

Here at e-Core, we have been talking about the “Meeting Monster” as well. One survey shows U.S. professionals in video conferences 20 hours per week, half their work time. Read our recent blog post to learn more and get some tips on how to spend less time in video conferences!

There are too many features and details to describe here. Of interest are a dynamic organization chart, support for identity providers like Okta, topics search and more.

Compass

Atlassian’s answer to “software sprawl,” the proliferation of SaaS apps and tools, is a developer portal to help Dev teams manage their burgeoning tech stacks. Compass offers real-time reporting on changes made to their software architecture. Farquhar described it as, “Mission control for your distributed software architecture.”

All components are tracked in Compass. Its component catalog calls out dependencies. It links information like ownership, documentation and APIs to each service. Everything developers need to know is in one place. Compass produces a daily health scorecard for each service that warns teams about security and compliance issues in real time.

Tiffany To, Atlassian head of product, Agile & DevOps, said Jira changed the game of how teams would collaborate to ship software. “We finally had the right tool for Agile software development,” she added. Now cloud migration offers scale, cost and resiliency leading to a shift from monolithic to microservices. “Modern software is no longer written; it’s assembled,” she said.

Compass offers three key capabilities:

1. a component catalog to handle microservices sprawl;

2. DevOps health to ensure resilience, scale, and security; and

3. an extensibility engine for maximum flexibility, powered by Forge.

“Compass is a hub for your Dev teams to collaborate,” To explained. “Compass is designed to simplify and contextualize. Our goal is to accelerate the learning curve. Your teams have a holistic view of all your components and their health. Automated scorecards are the missing link in your software chain.”

Atlassian Data Lake and Atlassian Analytics

The last two product announcements result from further investment in Atlassian Platform, a common foundation across Atlassian apps. Following the strategic theme outlined at the conference, these tools empower “Working Differently Together.” Access to data across the enterprise is now available.

Atlassian Data Lake breaks down silos. Cross-product, cross-instance data is available across the enterprise. Easy analysis, with pre-modeled and enriched fields, speeds up insight generation. Justine Davis, Atlassian head of marketing, Agile & DevOps solutions, said, “Everyone can operate as one product team and be on the same page. These native insights are absolutely valuable for teams. It gives the ability to teams to learn and improve in the process.”

Atlassian Analytics uses technology from Chartio, a cloud-based visualization and analytics solution acquired by Atlassian last year. It is a simple, flexible hub that connects to Data Lake. Users can access and present data in a variety of powerful visualizations.

Davis said, “We as Atlassian will take care of the complexity of managing the tools for you. All these tools can be automated and actioned on right in Jira. We are using the data to trigger actions through automation. We will take care of automating and integrating the rest.” She said these new tools can improve developer productivity by 20% simply by letting developers automate.

Conclusion

“Atlassian is a thriving ecosystem. It’s a winning platform connected with digital transformation. It is a macrotrend connected with the need for companies to work differently, in a more collaborative way that is open and transparent. All of those key elements, they are not buzzwords. They are in fact the reality of companies’ work now. Why is that important? Because companies can better innovate, companies can better serve their end clients, they can more meaningfully interact with consumers, they can interact with employees differently as well. That is the value proposition to our clients. That is the benefit of taking this digital journey. e-Core can be a valuable guide, partner and supporter in your digital journey.”

Marcio Silveira, e-Core CEO

There is a lot to digest from Atlassian Team ’22. At e-Core, we are very excited, and up to date, on the new products, Marketplace Apps, cloud migration, and other Atlassian and non-Atlassian tools. If you want to learn more on why choose e-Core to boost Atlassian Solutions, click here. For a better, and personalized, connection to your business team, schedule an appointment with one of our advisors.

Let our experience be the core of our partnership with you. For more than 22 years, e-Core has been a trusted technology partner for customers around the globe, helping them to unlock the value of technology investments. Our mission is to support our partners; our purpose is to make their technology more effective. Leverage e-Core’s expertise to improve processes, expand your software team, or build custom solutions on your behalf. Transform your business, scale for growth, and continuously improve your competitive advantage.