Re-usable checklists and capturing best practices within Confluence and JIRA

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, this post is about evaluating a decision that may save us a lot of money and time building an Atlassian plugin which people may not need, as well as work out what the pain points are which prevent Confluence and JIRA allowing you to effectively capture re-usable checklists such as best practices, how-tos, guidelines and procedures within your business.

We are building a startup (funded by the Government of Chile) called http://tallyfy.com

Tallyfy is a platform that will allow businesses to capture, use, analyse and improve best practices in the form of checklists. Effectively, the idea is to supercharge your workflow through the use of re-usable checklists for common things a business does, especially those processes which begin with "How to ..."

Before we invest a lot of time and resources building plugins for re-usable checklists (with analytics on Tallyfy) for Confluence and JIRA - would it be useful to you?

Do you think this plugin should be embeddable as a macro or use the new "Blueprints" feature of Confluence? Our idea was to simply create a new blueprint called "Checklist", which you can rename to "Best practice" if you like, to encourage correct usage of the feature. The business benefits of using, measuring and improving best practices are obvious - but I can elaborate if need be. They prevent avoidable mistakes and improve outcomes without any increase in skill.

Please note that this is NOT for task management, it's for re-usable checklists. We do intend to integrate into various task management plugins and apps though (if it's feasible) - linking what to do (tasks) with how to do it (Tallyfy checklists).

The idea is for us to integrate Tallyfy into Confluence through a plugin, and on the server-side - our SaaS will do all the real-time analytics and more. The part facing Confluence/JIRA will be lightweight (the user-facing end).

Your feedback is much appreciated. If you are very excited, there is a newsletter you can sign up to, at the bottom of http://tallyfy.com;-)

thanks

Amit

PS - one of our inspirations is the book "The Checklist Manifesto" by Dr. Gawande.

[BillA]

Great idea! I know lot people accomplish this use case by cloning subtasks in JIRA. See an example of this at http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/jira-cloning-to-create-a-template-for-repeated-documentation-tasks/

If you do plan to build this I would do it as an Atlassian Connect add-on so that it can work in Atlassian OnDemand.

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

Thanks for the note, Bill. Hope to present this at a future Atlassian event (spoken at a couple in London already). I'll deep-dive into the cloning sub-tasks idea and see what's missing there. We have a whole analytics thing which is significant too as it enables averages to be seen for repeatable processes (enabling improvement).

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

Bill, one more question - which I can't seem to find an answer to anywhere. Is an Atlassian Connect add-on/plugin exclusively for cloud-based Atlassian instances?

If corporates/other customers had on-premise Confluence/JIRA installations, must I also make the "traditional" type of plugin?

[John Masson]

Amit, yes at the moment Connect only works with OnDemand.

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

An update - we've relaunched Tallyfy and the new API is at:

https://go.tallyfy.com/api

Website here - https://tallyfy.com

Building a Confluence plugin that offers a "process" blueprint is still on the cards, since Confluence best handles unstructured info, while Tallyfy specifically focuses on structured process information e.g. procedures, SOP's and processes.

[Babul Mukherjee]

Did this plugin ever get done?

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

@Babul Mukherjee  not yet. Could you get in touch/schedule a chat via https://tallyfy.com/booking ?

Happy to talk about your needs/wish list for this.

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

Hi everyone - we need pilot clients for this and this needs to be led through customer needs. If you have a budget or use case that can help us achieve this, please let us know. We can be contacted via https://tallyfy.com 

We also have an open API btw at https://api.tallyfy.com in case someone wants to do this.

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

Hi all,

We'd be happy to speak with anyone interested - please get in touch via https://tallyfy.com/contact-us

Thanks

Amit

[ShabbirT]

In fact I was looking for something similar to what Amit has mentioned and ended up on this discussion. I think this kind of macro must be part of confluence to extend confluence functionality catering to wholesome process management. 

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

@ShabbirT what would be critical features (in your opinion) that such a plugin should have? 

[Tomasz Urbański]

Great idea! Any progress since 2013???

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

@Tomasz Urbański what would be critical features of the plugin, for your purposes?

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

I am quite interested about this, for Confluence.

[Amit - Blue Sheen]

@Sorin Sbarnea ( sorry for the late response here. What would be critical features for this, for your purposes? We intend to build it via our REST API.