Atlassian Team 2021 Q+A with Mary Raleigh and Rachel Lin

[#1]

Hello Community members! 

Mary and Rachel just gave a talk, Introducing the Loop: A framework for predictable comms in an unpredictable world, at Team 2021. 

In this session, listeners learned that while it may seem like your teams need better predictability, but what they really need are better relationships with the teams they rely on across the org. 

Now's your chance to ask Mary and Rachel about The Loop Framework, cross-team-comms, and any other questions that came up during their presentation! 

If you don't have a question, feel free to post your #1 takeaway in the comments below. They'll be around to answer your questions until Tuesday, May 4th ... so act quickly 😃

[Curt Holley]

Firstly, brilliant talk. Love the idea/ideals behind The Loop ❤

Question: Team Central, when and how can we get it? (I also wonder about cost) Perhaps other "Point A" sessions will help me answer these 🤔

#1 takeaway For me (as a Jira admin and Automation for Jira ninja) "Curate, don't automate" and the why behind that belief helped remind me not to underestimate the power of the human touch on communication and collaboration.

[Mary Raleigh]

Thank you so much @Curt Holley ! 

I'm so delighted our talk resonated with you, especially the curation aspect that I expect to be counter-intuitive in today's world of automate, automate, automate. 

To answer your question, Team Central is available NOW for Jira and Confluence cloud users. If you have an existing instance you can add it for free, or you can sign up for a free Jira or Confluence cloud instance and then add Team Central. If you are using Jira Server, you can sign up for the waitlist here and we'll let you know when we open up the Beta to more users. 

Regarding cost, we are currently in beta, which means all features are free for all users of your Jira and Confluence site. As we transition into general availability we will rollout a tiered pricing plan. We are still working on the details of our pricing plan but expect it to be akin to Trello’s pricing structure and in-line with Atlassian’s transparent and cost-effective pricing philosophy. We can’t promise anything but in the spirit of transparency, where is what we think will likely happen

• What you have today is remain free in terms of features with a possible user or feature usage limit (e.g. 100 projects). We have not decided what these usage limits are yet, and welcome any feedback on this area.

• Like Jira and Confluence, we will add standard and premium features which will be targeted more for organisations who have specific requirements to tailor Team Central to their culture (e.g. custom fields, private projects etc…)

Thanks again for your kind words! Please do let us know how you adapt Team Central and the Loop framework to meet your teams' needs!

[Curt Holley]

Thanks @Mary Raleigh 

We are on Premium Cloud. Will take it for a spin and provide feedback

[Darryl Lee]

I guess I'm coming at this backwards - reading Curt's thoughts prompted me to watch this session. (Hm. Does this link work: https://events.atlassian.com/team21/v/s-454358 ?)

Feedback in 30 minutes or so.

[mario]

The largest struggle of the loop will always be "Show that you are paying attention." You can't make someone do that, you can only make it as frictionless as possible (I like what I saw in Team Central) and make it have more value than effort for the contributors (those giving status).

That last question is really where I'm curious how, if at all, The Loop and Team Central address it.

[Mary Raleigh]

@Darryl Lee , yup linked work! Please do let us know what you think!

[Mary Raleigh]

@mario well said! 

We believe Team Central makes it easier than any other tool for stakeholders to show that they are paying attention, how?

• Team Central enables fast reactions to updates show you are listening without having to write a message or schedule a meeting (because hey sometimes you don't have feedback but it goes a long way to acknowledge an update is read and useful)
• Team Central also believes that context is key for stakeholders to give encouraging and constructive feedback so every update sits on a project homepage complete with 
  • a color coded timeline of status history
  • who is working on the project
  • the expected completion date, month or quarter
  • and instant access to the projects what, why and definition of success
• Lastly, we are considering building a read receipts mechanism, would you use that?

Thanks again for sharing your insights! If you haven't already please do take a look at the techniques we've written to help teams practice "Show that you are paying attention." We'd love to hear how you use them!

Mary

[Darryl Lee]

Wow, so I'm more of a tech-head, so normally I run away from all things "Program Management" related. My main takeaway from this was "Wait, do managers actually have time or desire to want to write weekly status reports? Ugh. Glad I'm not a manager!"

Fast-forward to today, in a Q&A for new employees at my new company. A program manager was talking about how there was a (relatively recent) initiative to start sharing status reports around the company, cross-functional, just so people can get a broad view of what's going on.

And I was like, "Wait. People actually do that?" :-}

(Currently it's done with Distribution Lists. Ugh.)

So I shared what I had heard in your talk (modeled on a social media feed, 280-character limit to encourage succinctness, ability to include graphics) and a link to the Team Central home page, but now I realize that the best "advertisement" for Team Central would be y'all's talk. Are there plans to make that video public?

Of course this is only my second day at the job, so it's unclear whether I'd really be able to "drive adoption" of this tool and get "buy-in" (oooh, so many buzzwords), but it was funny to hear somebody talking about something that I thought only happened in the magical Atlassian "Teamwork makes the Dream Work" world. :-}

[Mary Raleigh]

Hiya @Darryl Lee , I'd be happy to share the recorded talk with you to share with your team. Shoot me an e-mail at mary@atlassian.com and I'll send it your way!