Collaborating with Your Team

In this chapter, we’ll create a team space using what we’ve learned so far. First, let’s get to know the team. The team consists of five people who work from different countries in different time zones. It is not easy for them to come together physically, and they need a productive, collaborative workspace. Just like a physical office, they want to come together to discuss and share information. We will create this space virtually and put it at the team’s service. We will learn how to create a space and configure it properly, so that you can configure all team spaces within your company. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Preparing a team space
• Collaborating with your team
• Managing meetings
• Managing decisions
• Inspiring ideas for your team space

Technical requirements

You will need the following software and requirements to complete this chapter:

• An up-to-date web browser
• An active subscription to Confluence Cloud Premium

Preparing a team space

Here, we will create a space in which a team can collaborate. This virtual space is similar to a physical office where people can communicate with each other and work together. We need this space because it will be the home for all the content that your team will need.

We also want this space to have the following properties:

• We want transparency. All content must be accessible to everyone unless specifically indicated.
• All information should be collaboratively recorded, shared, and updated.
• This space must be a single source of truth for our team.
• This area should accelerate the adaptation of newcomers to the team.
• It should contribute to fostering trust between team members.
• We ought to minimize outdated information or do parallel work.
• We need to switch between tools to find documents.

Meanwhile, we want this space to contain the following content:

• A home page to welcome the team
• Contact information of...

Collaborating with your team

At first, Confluence may seem like a typical text processor, but it has a unique philosophy: Confluence is entirely based on cooperation. The priority here is not just to store the text in a cloud but also to manage information collaboratively. The interface and the features are designed according to this philosophy. In Confluence, all of the content is created, updated, and developed collectively. It is visible and collectively shared unless stated otherwise.

In Confluence, each element (pages, attachments, comments, etc.) is optimized for collaborative work. Many of the features that enable collaboration on Confluence are quite simple yet very powerful so that you can use the interactions here in a small team of 5 people or a large company of 10,000 people.

In Confluence, you can do the following:

• Develop content collaboratively
• Discuss an entire document
• Brainstorm on a specific region of a document
• Send a specific part of a...

Managing meetings

No matter how many participants there are, meetings, in different settings, will always exist in our lives. Whether you work in an office or with a distributed team, you must work on effectiveness. Confluence can help you plan your meetings to be organized only when necessary to protect valuable time and reach goals faster.

Confluence can help you with the following:

• Reducing the number of meetings
• Organizing more productive meetings

Reducing the number of meetings

You can have fewer meetings using the features we learned about on Confluence. Let’s look at how you can reduce the number of meetings through two different scenarios.

Scenario 1

You’re dealing with an important contract that you need to finalize and are expecting full participation from your team.

The traditional solution, which we don’t recommend, is, “Let’s organize a meeting and distribute a copy of the contract to everyone. Let’...

Managing decisions

Teams have to consistently make decisions for different objectives, and we are aware that recording, announcing, archiving, and managing these decisions is not always easy. At this point, Confluence has features that will help a distributed team carry out the decision-making process with full participation. In this section, we’ll talk about two macros (Decision and Decision Report) to keep track of both small and complex decisions and to make them more manageable and effective.

Using Decision for simple decisions

You can easily capture and keep track of your simple decisions using the Decision macro. You can access this macro in two ways:

• Press the + button from the menu located at the top of your page editing screen, then click on Decision from the drop-down menu.
• Use the /decision keyboard shortcut:

Figure 4.24 – Adding a decision

As you can see, we just captured two decisions.

Using Decision...

Inspiring ideas for your team space

You can add a lot of content other than meeting notes and resolutions to the team area. “What can we put in?” we hear you ask. You can add any content the team will probably need. Let's take a look at some examples:

• Team goals and objectives (OKRs)
• Team rules
• Team metrics (KPI's)
• Roadmap
• Frequently used links
• Links to other software you use such as Miro, Canva, Google Workspace
• All kinds of files such as .ppt, .excel, .pdf, .word, or .zip
• Brainstorming notes

Summary

In this chapter, we saw how Confluence can support a distributed team in collaboration. First, we created a team space containing all the information the team will need. Then, we provided a brief Overview page in this space and learned how to interact with our teammates, including important topics such as collaborative capturing, editing, and sharing information. Finally, after discussing how to manage meetings and decisions with Confluence, we also discovered powerful Confluence features such as templates and macros. Now, using all this new information, you can provide your teams with a solid workspace where they can collaborate while working remotely. In the next chapter, we will learn how to use macros to easily manage dynamic content.

Questions

1. What should you do to be notified of updates on all space pages?
2. What are the main differences between inline comments and page comments?
3. What benefits do Confluence templates bring to your meetings?
4. How do you get a list of all decisions in a space?
5. How do you increase meeting effectiveness with Confluence?

Answers

1. You have to watch the space.
2. Page comments are visible only in View mode. You can resolve inline comments.
3. You can prepare for meetings effectively using templates. Templates allow you to be more organized and save time during and after the meeting.
4. You can use the Decision Report macro to get a list of all decisions in a space.
5. By setting the meeting agenda clearly, you contribute to making everyone ready for the meeting. You can make your team more involved with a meeting note that can be updated by anyone and is easily accessible from different devices. By using macros, you can reuse your content both in Atlassian products and in other systems.

Further reading

• https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/project-collaboration/team-meetings
• https://www.atlassian.com/blog/inside-atlassian/how-to-facilitate-successful-offsite-meetings-human-dynamics
• https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/project-collaboration/team-meetings/how-to-go-meetless
• https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/project-collaboration/team-meetings/codelime-saves-time-meets-less
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/meeting-notes
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/weekly-meeting-notes
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/sprint-planning-meeting