Bringing visibility to workflows: RO teams’ takeaways from shift to Jira and Confluence

One year after DEM migrated from on-premise to cloud-hosted instances of Jira and Confluence, the number of teams using these workflow tools is growing. Within the RO, several teams, including Enrollment and Residency, Data Reporting and Eligibility, and Communications, have moved project management and tracking to Jira. This move goes beyond IT development, leveraging Jira’s capabilities to align priorities, increase visibility, and enhance collaboration, resulting in more efficient and aligned team efforts. Here are their takeaways.

How have Jira and Confluence helped you prioritize and track your work?

Kelly Norton: Previously, in DRE, both Athletic Academic Eligibility and Data Reporting maintained our project work in multiple locations – Google Suite, Confluence, Microsoft Tasks, and more. We maintained notes on in-progress work, work on the horizon, completed work and more. Having Jira as an interactive tool to create to-do lists within a project, organize work into epics, and create visibility of our work to better understand capacity has positively impacted how we function as a team. Heidi Tuescher-Gille: As a newcomer to the RO, I found there to be so many pieces of information that were second nature to others who had been a part of the team for several years. I made copious notes about what I was learning from colleagues and from reviewing documentation that existed in many locations. My challenge was remembering where they were – was it in Google Docs, Box, the shared network drive, my notebook!? To develop a more streamlined way to retrieve some of that information, I worked with Brittney Trimmer to create Confluence spaces where I could begin to develop and document operational details in one, easy and accessible place. It’s been incredibly helpful to retrieve those needed details in a matter of a couple clicks! Logan Reigstad: Previously, I had been broadly tracking ongoing projects in two Google Docs, referring to individual project documents for specific task progress, and using Microsoft To Do for quick reminders. Now, most of that tracking is being centralized in Jira, which makes it much easier to see at a glance what’s outstanding.

What is an unexpected benefit you/your team experienced in moving to Jira/Confluence?

Kelly: Three things come to mind:

1. Comments! Being able to use the comment feature to make notes on the work, tag people for next steps, etc. instead of waiting until the next team meeting to discuss as a group has helped move work forward.
2. The cloning feature to manage tasks that recur each term was much easier than expected.
3. We use the Jira Kanban Board to add structure to our meetings, and an opportunity to see and celebrate “little wins” when we get to share that we closed a ticket.

Heidi: After I began to work in Confluence, I realized how helpful it could be to capture many of the policies, procedures and other operational details that exist within the enrollment and residency spaces. With a short introduction to Confluence, the residency team really ran with it and have been building out an incredible space to capture the complexities of residency policies and review processes. I’m really excited to watch it grow and transform how we update documentation while being able to retain important historical context in one space! Logan: For me, I think it’s the added visibility of how work fits into the “big picture.” And it goes both ways; since using Jira more regularly, I feel as if I have a better understanding of what other teams in the RO are working on and can more clearly show how my work contributes to our larger projects and goals.

What was the most difficult part of jumping to Jira/Confluence?

Kelly: All in all, it was a smooth jump to Jira, because we took a slow roll approach. We met with Brittney Trimmer to discuss the implementation of our team spaces. We added a few Spring 2025 projects and yearly tasks into Jira, and used that semester to play around with what Jira offers and how it could work for us. As the year progressed and we saw benefit to Jira, we added future work into our backlog and made configurations to meet our team needs. At moments, it was difficult to not want to move everything into Jira, knowing that some work best lives (for now) in its current space. Heidi: I think the most difficult piece was trying to decide how I wanted to organize the Confluence space. The platform is very intuitive, so the process of learning was relatively easy. Brittney Trimmer has been instrumental in helping us through training, sharing tips and tricks as well as best practices! Logan: For all its flaws, I felt like my multi-document tracking workflow was at least serviceable. Learning yet another platform and tool wasn’t something I was initially overjoyed about, but now that I’ve gotten the hang of things, I can certainly say it was worth the effort.

Do you have any future goals/plans related to Jira or Confluence that you hope to accomplish in 2026?

Heidi: There are others on the team that are interested in learning how they can maximize Jira and Confluence to organize and document the many processes they work with throughout the year. It can be overwhelming when you look at an entire cycle of tasks and processes, but spending some time breaking it all down into smaller, more manageable pieces helps. My experience has been that once you just get started, you find yourself more interested and driven to build it out – regardless if that takes a week, a month, or a year! Logan: I’m hoping to find a way to add recurring tasks (like website updates that happen at the end of every term) and have them repeat as applicable without needing to create a new work item each time. This would be a major improvement to my current workflow of calendar reminders, to-do list reminders, and screenshots. Kelly: Like Logan, we are looking at building more recurring semester and yearly tasks into the Jira space. We plan to explore the Forms feature of Jira – allowing DRE to collect from other teams information “requests” of work needed from our team.