Category: Confluence

the Atlassian platform as a hackathon TOOLKIT

23/7/2015

There's nothing quite like the intensity of a 48hr Hackathon to test a teams productivity and their execution speed for the Form, Storm, Norm and Perform team development cycle. It's an environment where the collaboration is fast paced and needs tools that are up to the challenge.

Laughing Mind recently partnered with a team of complete strangers as part of the Melbourne 'Hacking Ageing' Hackathon, hosted by Health XL at the Carlton Connect Initiative CoWorking space in July, 2015. We were tasked to come up with a response to one of three key Aged Care sector challenges: Dementia Care, Loneliness+Physical Inactivity, Malnutrition.

For many of the team, this was their first opportunity to be exposed to a range of tools from the Atlassian stack. I was there with my Health Professional and Atlassian Ecosystem partner hats on, knowing some of the sector challenges and what might be possible with targeted focus.

Our #HXLHack #collaboration experience, powered by @Atlassian @balsamiq Great experiential learning 4 team. pic.twitter.com/IX8haaPMyd
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) July 11, 2015

Here's what we used, all run from Atlassian Cloud services and the Atlassian Marketplace:

Confluence: For product scoping, documenting target audience market research and as an all-in-one-place repository for team products. We then bolstered it with the following add-on products to enhance our product needs analysis, business model and wireframe development:

Comala Canvas: for Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas blueprints
Gliffy: For use-case and persona exploration to confirm needs, function points
Balsamiq: For wireframe mockups for mobile devices (tablets, smartphones)

Product Experience Canvas - sample.

Balsamiq Mockup sample

HipChat: We needed an Instant Messaging platform that was going to be able to pull in the activity stream of updates from Confluence pages that were being worked on, as well as support fast file share, URL share and team comments. That gave us the capacity to see page updates rolling in as the team churned through our analysis and product planning. It also gave us the capacity (though we didn't use it on this occasion, with an in-house reference audience) to reach out to target audiences for a secure one-on-one chat with them entering the room as a guest, for extra validation.

JIRA: Whilst provisioned, task allocation wasn't needed whilst we clustered in one spot as a co-located team; if we had been faced with the challenge of co-ordinating tasking with a larger team, this would definitely have been used, but team size played in our favour on this occasion.

Hackathon Outcomes

The team was fortunately comprised of some excellent tech toolsmiths, UX skills and product development - we made use of our team from Via-Apps to leverage their MobileSmith Application Development platform to come up with a 1st generation App build, able to be downloaded onto both iOS and Android devices as an installable, functioning App within a 36hr period. Yes, that's quick. As a result of our efforts, we've now identified:

A fantastic Product Development guy in Mike Ebinum from Seed Digital;
A nimble + experienced App Development partner with cross-platform development capability;
Opportunities beyond the Hackathon;
Refinement opportunities in the platform provisioning model to feedback to Atlassian;
Addressable market opportunities of Dementia Caregivers in a Consumer Directed Care model, making services easier to find and engage;
Integration opportunities with IBM Watson and Bluemix for some targeted Cognitive Computing feature sets.

5min Q+A - views from the team

I took the time to do a quick retrospective with our team to explore their experience of the Atlassian tools, with a few short questions, bearing in mind this was a fast baptism of fire for a team of seasoned, experienced professionals that had not had much exposure to the platform before :

What was your awareness of Atlassian products before we met?

Aware if it, but almost no experience using it.

None. On the projects I worked we use platforms such as Slack.
We were more communication oriented. But I had never heard of Atlassian before,

Some familiarity with Jira (ticketing, change management) – no real experience of Confluence UX.

What did you find most useful about them in our Project?

Having a single place in which to deposit all information, The ease of sharing information, Confluence’s ability to manage multiple edits.

The platform in general is pretty cool.

I was surprised at the degree of effectiveness..Confluence.. introduced..how quickly it brought us together collaboratively ie. there was no need to go looking for things, there was a place and space for new content which was immediately shared (by doing nothing further) with everyone involved.

What would you say to someone interested in using the Atlassian platform, from your recent experience?

Make sure you get at least 10 minutes worth of overview / training before jumping in.

I like it. I use it for all my projects. BUT be patient in learning how to use it.
Yet, as I used it, I needed to learn how to use it. Not 100% intuitive.
Once you know the tricks that can be really complicated it's better.

I think it is a fantastic opportunity. What I’m looking for is enterprise reliability and a great user experience, the Atlassian platform seems to address both. There would appear to be a number of ‘hidden gems’ and talking to someone who knows the product back to front to help would be my recommendation. I’m quite comfortable trusting the platform...would be comfortable recommending to peers.

Thanks crew, would work with each of you again in a heartbeat. No question.

#HXLHACK Memorable #hackathon w @ViaAppsOz @PedroRosasMex + Mike from @seeddigitalco Gr8 team. @DeveloperSteve pix pic.twitter.com/p1iFOIc2hE
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) July 13, 2015

.@Health_xl #hxlhack overview and solutions here: http://t.co/GpcW7WQMqq @aging20 #a2coverage
— Stephen Johnston (@sdbj) July 23, 2015

0 Comments

ecovillage delivery and management toolkit - Part 1

13/9/2013

0 Comments

We're always seeing interesting deployment scenarios for the tools we implement and support from Atlassian as part of our Atlassian Expert services. Whilst positioned as a set of tools for supporting the Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC), in practice they are capable of much more flexible business process management and project delivery patterns.

In this post, we're going to examine a deployment scenario of JIRA as a project delivery tool for the creation and management of an EcoVillage, since we've got access to a living, breathing project locally that we've offered to help out with. It's an information management challenge that appeals to our core focus of creating Humane Systems, Spaces+Places. This also acts as a good information discovery project for modelling purposes and provides us with a useful test site. The project involves the efforts of a dispersed group of stakeholders across sites where they can't easily meet face to face, so its a distributed collaboration. We'll be using Confluence as well, for handling some of the co-authoring of content for key project documentation. For ease, we'll do it in a 10user OnDemand instance, as it's insanely good value for a low monthly fee of $10 for 10users. Perfect for a StartUp focus.

For definitional purposes, we're going to use the Context Institutes definition of an EcoVillage as a

human-scale
full-featured settlement
in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world
in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.

To help make a start on some of the information modelling, we've turned to previous work done at http://www.gaiavillages.org where they've segmented 5 main domains of activity that correspond well to JIRA Components. See the detail in the figure below for what is covered in the 5 information domains (source: http://www.gaiavillages.org/how-will-it-work/how-it-works).

The patterns that need to be supported in this domain include:

Project Components that align with the 5 main information domains (Coordination, Social, Political, Ecology, Economy);
Issue Identification and Management (with customisable workflow and entry forms);
Issue Linking (as some issues raised will have (potentially multiple) dependencies between them);
Extension of the standard Issue Type scheme to include a new Issuetype (Risk), with a new subtask (Mitigation) that can be associated with it;
Issue Watching and Voting (to help triage and moderate the prioritisation of work, democratisation of perspectives);
Issue Reporting (to help stay on top of a backlog and keep things moving, managed in an orderly way)
Delegated responsibility to guild leaders (think of them as Component Leads) for actioning issues raised through to resolution, or assigning to interested community members/volunteers

These are all well accommodated with the flexible customisation potential of JIRA, so we're looking forward to setting up the information management platform and project reporting dashboard to see if this plays out OK with the project stakeholders. Whilst it's a small project, it builds nicely on our history of tweaking JIRA for Capital Project delivery (including large scale suburban development).

With a series of upcoming initiatives at Laughing Mind that deal with urban revitalisation, renewal and community development, we think this should be a good living lab for some of the chats we're likely to have at DIGFestival, with the focus on Design-Interactive-GreenTech and an overarching theme of 'Adapt or Die'. More to come in our next writeup, as we start to knit together some geospatial layering into the mix..

0 Comments

Identifying and treating collaboration dysfunction

16/5/2013

0 Comments

Atlassian have been running a tongue-in-cheek campaign about identifying and treating Collaboration Dysfunction using a measured dose of Confluence, their enterprise Wiki product.

Our experience in management consulting and human factors in technology confirms it. As Atlassian Experts, we've helped support and connect disparate project teams to keep them creating and producing - forming and performing without ever physically meeting- using Confluence as the glue that holds their team efforts together and gets them delivering.

If you identify your organisation as suffering from any of the symptoms of collaboration dysfunction, let us help get you a correct dosage of Confluence, with maybe a nice plugin mix from the Atlassian Marketplace and start you on a path to higher productivity and quality delivery. If you're already using it, let us show you how you can integrate JIRA for superb workflow driven task management as an integrated business platform for planning, tracking, producing and improving.

Collaborative Dysfunction
[kuh-lab-uh-rey-tiv] [dis-fuhngk-shuh-n]: The inability to work together as a team or maintain collaboration long enough to achieve satisfactory results.

TreatingCollaboration Dysfunction-handout

0 Comments

Distributed Project delivery with confluence

13/3/2013

0 Comments

Confluence 5 'Create' flow

A lot of the distributed project work we do is delivered using products from Atlassian. It does help that we're an Atlassian Expert, but using the tools to deliver and manage projects with our clients adds a layer of extra value. It's good to know where teams can hit limitations within projects to know when a tool is needed, or something else entirely, like some traditional face to face time. It's surprising how often we still encounter Australian businesses (including big ones) who continue to use email, shared word and excel documents, hitting Application sharing/Platform constraint issues (share as .doc or .docx?), version control management and lack of a joined up view of where a project is up to. Typical Collaboration Dysfunction and risky as an enterprise approach.

This is just a brief intro to the combinations of products that we use, with some of the videos that are routinely prescribed to new project team members who might not be used to the platforms or wiki based approaches to distributed collaboration.

Step 1. Crawl - WIKI Work 1.0

Wiki-based working is perhaps one of the biggest things people take some getting used to, getting a feel for how multi-authored content is created, versioned and shared. It's different to old-school Word processing/FileNetwork saving, but still has all that's needed to create the thing that's important - content - with the right amount of formatting options to enhance content without the complexity of 'feature bloat'. Confluence 5 has just been released as well, which is better than its ever been for creating, planning, editing and managing content, whilst staying informed about team updates in the activity stream.

Step 2. Walk - MashUPS

We routinely use a couple of other products in project based Confluence workspaces:
TeamCalendars - This helps display and get all scheduled project activity visible more easily, across the project team. It's been great to see this product evolve to the point where it could replace plugins such as the Gantt view plugin for Jira - now I can generate a dynamic project timeline of key project deliverables and overlay team availability, key business events and hook into JIRA for more detailed views. Whilst this is possible with internal scheduling tools, try doing that easily across multiple collaborating organisations!

HipChat - we regularly find ourselves working across a range of Enterprise Social products in our collaborations, including Yammer, Tibbr, MSLync, Skype. Sometimes it's nice to stick with simple, time limited Instant Messaging, so we use HipChat pretty regularly for Project based chats where we need to bounce an idea around quickly. However, we're still big fans of Tibbr for the big jobs in larger teams, have worked in sites where Confluence+Jira+Tibbr are integrated nicely as a next step up..

the Atlassian platform as a hackathon TOOLKIT

Hackathon Outcomes

5min Q+A - views from the team

ecovillage delivery and management toolkit - Part 1

Identifying and treating collaboration dysfunction

Distributed Project delivery with confluence

Step 1. Crawl - WIKI Work 1.0

Step 2. Walk - MashUPS

Step 3. Deliver..

Archives

Our blog

Categories