Bandhan Life unites teams with Jira and Confluence Cloud

Challenge: India's Bandhan Life wanted a better way to connect teams and work across the organization so they could improve collaboration, tracking, strategic alignment, and visibility.

Solution: The life insurance company expanded their use of Jira and Confluence to create a unified, collaborative system of work.

Impact: By centralizing almost all teams onto Jira and Confluence, Bandhan Life has not only achieved their original goals, but also saved time on project management and reporting.

Building a digital-first insurance experience with a connected system of work

Bandhan’s Life is India’s first insurance company to embrace digital-first and distributed work models. The team has bold plans to lead change in their sector, aiming to streamline the employee, customer, and partner experience.

Traditionally, processes related to life insurance are highly manual, involving a lot of paperwork and documentation. Security is also a key concern, as the insurance space handles sensitive information that’s vulnerable to fraud.

For Bandhan Life, transitioning to a new model was an ambitious goal. To make it happen, the team knew they’d need to adjust their process and platform.

In search of a centralized system for communication, collaboration, and alignment

Bandhan Life’s day-to-day work often requires collaboration between internal and external parties, such as when employees onboard new distribution partners (like banks and insurance brokers) to sell the company’s life insurance policies. With so much coordination involved, easing collaboration was a key priority of this digital transformation.

Before Bandhan expanded their use of Atlassian tools, employees had their own processes for each workflow. Most tracked work in Excel and communicated over Slack, email, and Microsoft Teams. Information was siloed between these systems, meaning people had to search across platforms or chase each other down for information.

This not only created friction and slowed people down, but also made reporting and prioritization difficult. With more than 120 projects across 25 departments, it was challenging for leadership to see how work was progressing and allocate resources, especially across different locations and areas of the organization.

“It took us two working days just to prepare a project progress report,” explains Vice President of the CEO’s Office, Shahid Hussain. “It would have be created, reviewed, and then edited again before it was even ready to be viewed by leadership.”

Executive Vice President of CISO and IT Governance Kiran Belsekar adds, “As a work-from-anywhere organization, it became difficult to track projects, do daily check-ins, and monitor employees' work. Everyone was working hard, but unfortunately, outcomes weren’t being realized from an OKR perspective.”

Bandhan Life needed a more connected system of work that would capture progress, keep teams aligned, and create visibility into how work ladders up to big-picture goals. “We wanted to create broad visibility as a better way to steer energy towards organizational goals and keep people out of silos,” Kiran says.

Expanding Jira and Confluence into a system of work, supported by Padah Solutions

Bandhan Life sought out Padah Solutions as a Solution Partner to help solve this challenge. Priti Kumar, founder of Padah Solutions, recommended expanding the company’s Atlassian usage instead of adopting a new tool. Bandhan Life’s technical teams were already long-time users of Jira, so going all-in on Atlassian cloud made sense.

To meet the needs of different business functions, Padah Solutions deployed both agile and waterfall Jira boards. They also integrated Jira with Microsoft Outlook and Teams so that Bandhan Life could use these tools in a more streamlined way and centralize communication.

“Padah analyzed our requirements and designed effective solutions,” Shahid says. “We had frequent catch-ups with them throughout the process, and it was completed very quickly because of their involvement and expertise with Jira.”

Jira and Confluence: the perfect tools for Bandhan Life’s collaborative culture

Today, Atlassian cloud serves as the collaboration platform for nearly the entire organization. Teams use Jira to collaborate and track work, plus Confluence as a centralized knowledge base. “Atlassian tools have become our culture,” says Kiran. “Every initiative starts in Jira.”

Now, Bandhan Life’s teams can easily work together throughout the life cycle of each project, no matter how many people need to collaborate.

From the beginning, teams create comprehensive, end-to-end roadmaps for prioritization and scheduling with Jira Plans. Then, issues are automatically created in Jira, tasks assigned, and timelines set. Employees use Jira and Confluence to communicate throughout planning and execution, helping everyone stay on the same page, manage dependencies, and minimize delays. “Nearly everyone is dependent on some other function, and with Jira, that’s easy to understand,” Shahid says. “Reports clearly show which teams are dependent on each other for support and deliverables.”

Dashboards and filters in Jira also make it easy to track progress and key milestones, eliminating the need for managers to manually collect status updates or spend days compiling a report. “We spend less time finding out which project is at which stage, and which is most important,” says Shahid. “We have a real-time view of what’s happening, which drives peer-to-peer accountability.”

Collaboration, communication, and visibility: working together to drive key outcomes

Since unifying with the Atlassian system of work, Bandhan Life has seen measurable improvements in speed, visibility, and efficiency. “We are strongly outcome-oriented organization. Jira and Confluence are helping us drive that behavior as we set a new standard for a work-from-anywhere, digital-first model,” says Shahid.

90% adoption within 90 days

Because Padah Solutions assisted Bandhan Life in configuring Jira and Confluence to meet all their teams' varying needs, the organization saw rapid adoption. Within three months, 90% of users adopted Atlassian cloud tools as an integral part of daily work.

30% less time on project management

With Jira and Confluence, there’s no need to chase down stakeholders to assess progress. From the 100+ Jira boards in Bandhan Life’s projects, managers find all the information they need. Since the transition, managers are spending 30% less time monitoring and managing projects, which means more time to do high-impact work.

20% increase in individual productivity

Before Jira and Confluence, employees had to spend time every day digging through systems, asking colleagues for help, and managing dependencies and approvals. Jira and Confluence eliminate most of that work, saving each employee roughly 1.5 hours each day.

400 hours per year saved on reporting

Before centralizing on Atlassian cloud, teams would spend two days preparing a report every time they needed to share project progress with senior management. Jira has automated nearly all of that work, saving roughly 100 hours per quarter or 400 hours per year.

95% of all communications captured in Jira

Instead of of being scattered across Excel, email, Slack, and Teams, almost all project-related communications (for everything except field sales work) are now captured and tracked within Jira, helping people feel more in-the-know about the progress and status of their work. “We have full visibility before work even starts,” explains Shahid. “Every initiative is entered in Jira, and a trigger email informs everyone it’s launched.”

Real-time prioritization

With more visibility and easier reporting, employees can make decisions faster and adjust as needed. Leaders can also prioritize dynamically and collaboratively, viewing any project’s status through Jira during meetings instead of relying on a static report.

Because everyone can see real-time project status and importance at a glance, employees at every level of the company — not just leaderships — find it easier to focus on the work that matters most. “With Jira and Confluence, everyone is automatically prioritizing what’s important and naturally working toward better end outcomes,” says Shahid.

The right platform and partners to lead Indian insurance into a new era

While unifying on Jira and Confluence Cloud has improved the employee experience at Bandhan Life, distributors who sell their policies and the customers looking to secure their futures are benefitting too. “We’ve seen an increase in speed for both product delivery and partner onboarding,” Shahid explains.

With Atlassian cloud tools and support from Padah Solutions, Bandhan Life’s teams are delivering on their vision of a more convenient, digital-first insurance experience for employees, partners, and customers across the country.