At the enterprise level, you could easily have as many different project management tools as you have teams. Why is that a problem?
When those teams need to collaborate, things get complicated—and they end up in unnecessary meetings just to agree on a starting point. And if your company spans time zones and countries, that’s neither easy nor efficient. Not to mention you’re paying for multiple platforms that essentially do the same thing.
A work management solution is project management and much more; it serves as the single source of truth for your entire company. It should also streamline operations and ensure everyone’s rowing in the same direction as fast as possible.
Let’s look at the features a work management solution should have, how they help enterprise teams work more effectively, and where to find them.
1. Automation capabilities that save your teams’ time
Challenge: Your highly skilled (and highly compensated) employees are wasting time on repetitive manual tasks that keep them from the innovative and strategic work they’re trained to do. Not only does this cost your organization time and money, but it can also lead to disengaged employees.
Solution: Your work management solution should automate repetitive tasks so your employees can focus on high-value work.
Almost three-quarters of IT leaders agree that employees can save 11 to 30% of the time they spend on manual processes with automation. And 90% of knowledge workers surveyed say automation has improved people’s lives at work.
Trello’s Butler is a bot that can automate almost any action within your Trello boards. All you have to do is set a trigger and define the action you want Butler to perform. For example, you can set up automatic emails with a rundown of the previous day’s board activity or ping a colleague to add their ideas to a card once it’s been created. And the more you use Trello, Butler will start recognizing repetitive tasks and suggest automations for you—how cool is that?
2. Integrations with other tools in your tech stack
Challenge: Siloed systems create incomplete and inconsistent data, duplicate processes, and compliance risks. Yet businesses use an average of 130 SaaS tools, according to BetterCloud’s 2023 State of SaaSOps report.
Solution: Consolidate redundant apps (e.g., all those different project management platforms) and choose a work management solution that integrates with your other favorite tools, like Figma, Slack, and Miro.
Atlassian supports a diverse app ecosystem for improved visibility and streamlined workflows. For example, when you copy-and-paste URLs in Confluence, they automatically convert into Smart Links, creating more context and the ability to interact with content on other platforms without ever leaving the page. Talk about efficiency!
3. Asynchronous communication and a single source of truth
Challenge: Your teams don’t have a standardized way to communicate important information and updates. This results in time lost looking for information, distractions, and duplicated efforts.
63% of employees surveyed said they’ve missed information because it went into a siloed communication source (like someone’s inbox).
Solution: You need a single source of truth that anyone in the company can access. Use a teamwork directory like Atlas to keep all of your teams, their apps, and their work connected.
Atlas shares the what, why, who, and how of your teams and their projects. With Atlas, cross-functional teams can easily access projects and visualize progress in the context of broader company goals. No more tiresome status meetings, no more interrupting teammates’ focus time to ask a project-related question, and no more duplicating tasks.
4. Centralized platforms for cross-team collaboration
Challenge: Poor collaboration between your teams is taking a toll on your budget, your resources, your timelines, and employee morale.
45% of employees surveyed say a lack of direction or agenda is a challenge, and another 45% cite the inability to communicate action items and follow-ups after a meeting as a problem.
Solution: Keep your teams aligned with a centralized work hub and content-collaboration platform.
Part virtual workspace, part knowledge base, Confluence enables your teams to access all the information they need in context—all in one place. They can also build, organize, and collaborate on work no matter where they are.
For a more macro view of your teams’ projects, Trello provides a collective work hub where you can manage meetings, teamwork, brainstorming, and more. Your Trello boards keep projects moving forward and tasks organized by breaking them down into manageable chunks and creating visibility for anyone you invite.
5. Increased visibility across the project lifecycle
Challenge: 12% of project managers said lack of visibility is the number one challenge to successful project management. That’s not terribly surprising when you consider that 29% of them track progress through in-person or virtual meetings.
Solution: Streamline projects across large teams and create visibility into tasks, deadlines, and deliverables all in one place with Jira Work Management.
Scrum and Kanban boards help teams work efficiently, roadmaps give teams the context needed to make rapid decisions and stay aligned, and reports and dashboards enable data-driven decisions to set teams up for success.
6. Enterprise-grade security to protect company data
Challenge: Your company has strict data security and governance requirements to meet. But the changing IT landscape, rising complexities, and more teams going remote-first make it increasingly difficult to manage usage and cybersecurity.
43% of IT and security pros say they’ve added a new app that stores sensitive data in the last year and 42% say they have difficulty securing users’ activities.
Solution: Connect your work-management platforms to your identity provider (like Okta, Idaptive, and Azure AD) and monitor usage with Atlassian Access.
Atlassian Access offers enterprise-grade identity and access management for easy and secure user administration. Admins can review organization-wide audit logs, create customized authentication policies, and eliminate manual processes that create security risks.
Streamline work management with Atlassian Together
A work management solution with robust capabilities and multiple platforms that work together and integrate seamlessly with other popular software applications can help your teams work together smarter, not harder.
Atlassian Together is a collection of Atlassian’s best-of-breed collaboration tools—Trello, Atlas, Confluence, and Jira Work Management—designed to make sure work flows freely across teams and tools at scale.