Stay on track: Project documentation with Confluence

Templates to get started

The first challenge is getting things off the ground. So turn to templates for both Confluence pages and spaces to kickstart your documentation and keep things smooth.

Insert page elements to turn the documentation into something polished, robust, and easy to read across team members, stakeholders

Within a specific Confluence page, you can insert unique elements (like action items within a checklist, or code snippets for developers) to better organize every idea. The result: your documentation isn’t just a handy reference doc. It’s something far more polished, robust, and easy for every stakeholder to use.

What page elements can you work with? You’ll have plenty of options:

• Action items use “@” mentions to tag a specific user for a follow-up. This mention then shows up as a checklist item under that user’s profile, which makes each day’s tasks easy to monitor—as well as highly collaborative.
• Code snippets let you format the source code with numbered rows and syntax highlighting—all based on the language you choose to employ.
• Dates can stand out from the surrounding context with unique highlights, which helps place emphasis on key project milestones.
• Dividers insert horizontal lines to distinguish between sections and keep your documentation easier to scan.
• Expanders allow you to collapse/expand different sections, which is great for keeping essential information without letting too much text dominate a page.
• Headings not only delineate between sections, but allow you to construct a dynamic table of contents overview for the entire page.
• Panels are easy-access, pre-built elements for specific sections like warnings, highlights, and notes, which let you call out key points.

• Quotes differentiate between normal content and when you’re referencing someone else’s work.

Not only are these elements useful, but they’re easy to incorporate: just type “/quote,” for example, and you’re instantly formatting a new quote. The result: a finely-polished project documentation page that’s easy to read, digest, and scan—while keeping all team members in the loop.

Collaborative features for editing, comments, and feedback

“Too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the dish.” But a project may need all sorts of cooks.

The problem isn’t how many cooks you have; it’s the complex communication. If every email distraction or Slack notification throws off 23 minutes of work time, these wayward issues can lead to project delays.

The solution is to do everything within Confluence. Editing, comments, feedback, and questions should all go to the same place. If a user has a question about a project within Confluence, turning to their email inbox for an answer creates unnecessary busy work. It also means you’re losing track of key project details that might be exchanged in those email threads. When you search for them within your project management platform, those details are lost.

Tracking progress with Jira

Integrate Confluence and Jira, and you’ll have something like a superhero crossover movie working in your favor. You can stack your superpowers using both tools without losing the advantages of either tool.

Jira’s features for helping your team track project work—including Epics for creating timelines, powerful agile scrum boards for separating to-do tasks from in-progress tasks, and generating reports and insights so you can see where you’re falling behind—are invaluable. But pair them with Confluence and you’ve got project documentation that can do even more.

For example, you can create an embedded Confluence page within Jira without leaving the project. Once again, this keeps the entire team on the same page—in this case, literally. And if there are issues that you need to resolve within Jira, you can add Confluence pages for the same reason.

Or you can use Confluence timelines with Jira. Insert a Jira timeline macro and you’ll seamlessly import an existing project’s timeline to your Confluence Cloud page. These timelines are easy to read, clearly define your milestones, and give you a bird’s-eye view of your project status.

You can also create Jira reports from within the Confluence cloud, keeping your Confluence project documentation on pace with everything happening within Jira. If a specific milestone is a few days behind, your report will let you know.

Use page history for any “oh no” moments

“Hold up.”

Two of the most fearsome words in project management. Everything is ticking along smoothly, the momentum of your project is starting to move downhill, and someone notices a bug or requests a quick revision.

Suddenly that schedule isn’t looking so attainable.

Of course, changes and revisions are just par for the course for any meticulously planned project. The key is to keep them contained to each specific milestone. Otherwise, changes and revisions become more than tweaks: they become complications that can leak out into the rest of the project and create all sorts of unnecessary distractions.