Which teams can benefit from Confluence?
You may wonder whether Confluence is the right tool for your team or company. Let’s now discuss how Confluence is flexible and can be efficiently used by teams and companies with different backgrounds and needs:
- Your company’s focus area does not matter when using Confluence. Any team or company can benefit from Confluence, and the critical point is to have a solid willingness to manage your knowledge for better collaboration. As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we have already helped some very different teams. Some examples of these industries include technology, software development, finance, education, and government.
- Confluence has robust features to adapt to modern teams’ different needs. No matter your team type, you can use Confluence as your primary collaboration tool. Some types of teams we have worked with include human resources, finance, sales, marketing, operations management, support teams, project management teams, product management teams, boards of directors, service teams, and many more.
- Your company size does not matter when using Confluence. You can easily use Confluence whether yours is a one-person company or a company of thousands, and you can comfortably go up to 35,000 users within a single Atlassian Cloud site.
- Your company’s working practices do not matter when using Confluence. We all work differently, and you may be working entirely from the office, in a hybrid fashion, or entirely remotely. Thanks to Confluence, you can easily manage your knowledge.
- Your information security and privacy needs can vary greatly, but Confluence will adapt. Confluence can be optimized according to your information security and privacy needs. You may apply the principles of transparency to a large extent in the company and want the content to be generally accessible to the entire company. On the other hand, you may be dealing with sensitive content that requires confidentiality due to the nature of your business, and you want only authorized people to see it under certain conditions. Confluence has features to address the needs of these two extremes and all situations in between. In later chapters, we’ll look closely at Confluence’s security-related features.
- Your cloud adoption preferences do not restrict you from using Confluence. Some companies prefer using cloud products, and others do not. Some companies are not allowed to use cloud products because of their regulations. So, you have two options here: you can use Confluence Cloud or Confluence Data Center. In either case, Confluence will help you master modern collaboration within your company.
- You are always free to use other tools with Confluence. Some teams in your company may already be using SharePoint, Google Docs, Notion, or other systems, and you don’t have to quit them. You can use Confluence with these systems.
Proof of concept – how can your company benefit from Confluence?
Confluence is a flexible yet robust environment that can fulfill the most demanding requirements of different teams. It’s not just a content creation platform but a solid collaboration environment.
In the previous sections, we mentioned that Confluence could be helpful for different teams. Now, we will see more concretely how Confluence can be used. It is worth remembering that what you can do with Confluence is much more than what is explained here.
There are some features common to all of the following scenarios. Atlassian has placed qualified templates for many different needs within Confluence. You can get effective results in a short time using these templates. In addition to these templates, you can create your own. You can even adapt Confluence according to your needs by using its plugin software.
In the next subsection, we’ve put together some real-life scenarios that might inspire you. These examples can be beneficial in building your team’s collaborative muscles. In this way, it may become necessary for your teams to be in the same environment, but only in some exceptional cases.
Confluence use cases for all types of teams
Confluence offers templates and features that can address some common problems that teams often need, regardless of their types of functions. With Confluence, you can efficiently manage notes, decisions, meetings, to-dos, plans, calendars, and all kinds of content.
Confluence can help you with the following use cases:
- Knowledge management
- Information gathering and sharing
- Announcements
- Meeting notes
- Calendars
- Blogs
- Decisions
- Brainstorming
Introduction to Confluence templates
All teams can get started quickly with Confluence. Templates are one of the essential concepts that can speed up your work. We will look at the templates in more detail later in the book. Now, we're giving you a summary of the templates here to show you how many well-designed, ready-made templates Confluence has for different teams. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the templates found on Confluence has been prepared by Atlassian. However, there are many other companies besides Atlassian that offer templates such as Optimizely, Miro, and Figma.
The numbers of templates available on Confluence as of January 2023 for different kinds of teams are as follows:
Table 1.4: Template categories in Confluence
As you can see from the preceding table, there are many templates for different teams on Confluence. You can get a good start on Confluence using these, and later, you can create your own templates.
Templates for sales and marketing teams
Sales and marketing teams are often among the most energetic teams within a company. It’s expected that these fast-paced teams have mastery over collaborative work.
On Confluence, there are 19 ready-to-use templates that can accelerate the pace of these teams. Some examples include the following:
Templates for human resources teams
Human resources teams are at the forefront of the teams that have the most communication with the other teams around them. HR teams must quickly and effectively manage recruitment, adaptation, performance audit, leaving the job, and many other processes, create a large amount of content, and bring together and organize that content. In addition, they can make the rules and procedures that everyone in the company must follow visible to the whole company using Confluence.
There are 17 templates for human resources teams in Confluence, which include the following:
- Employee handbook
- 90-day plan
- Performance improvement plan
- Hiring process
- Career development plan
- Job description
- Job offer letter
- Interview feedback
Templates for project management
Confluence can be very useful for agile project management, especially with Jira. It provides project managers with useful, ready-made templates and reliable features for planning, communicating, working with stakeholders, setting goals, and so on.
There are 32 templates for project management, which include the following:
- Project plan
- Project kickoff
- Stakeholder management
- Risk register
- Daily stand up
- Retrospective
Templates for product management teams
Product management teams are highly specialized in knowledge management. Doing research, collecting requirements, designing, analyzing, interviewing users, making data-based decisions, making roadmaps, holding meetings, and so on, are among product management activities. A large amount of content accumulates while doing these studies. They can use Confluence to keep this content tidy, and they can keep all content in one place that’s accessible to both their teams and relevant stakeholders.
There are 18 templates designed for product management teams within Confluence, including the following:
Templates for software development and IT teams
Software projects can quickly become highly sophisticated. All the content stakeholders with different needs can be brought together on Confluence. If you start such a project on Confluence, you can create a world-class environment quickly by using ready-made templates. These templates cover essential topics, especially collecting requirements, planning, enabling meetings, and managing decisions. Confluence works in harmony with many different tools used by software developers.
There are 19 templates available for software development and IT teams, including the following:
- DevOps runbook
- DevOps change management
- ITSM change management
- Incident communication
- ITSM runbook
We’ve discussed how different teams could benefit from Confluence. You can use these use cases to build your company’s knowledge management system. Now, it’s time to think about your Confluence team that will build, maintain, and develop this system.