Combine Confluence Templates with Jira Reports and Change the Way You Think

Mar 16

Do you know that Confluence has over 120 built-in templates that you can use to make team collaborations more efficient? Confluence templates allow you to easily create well-structured content more consistently to improve visibility.

While it's hard to pick favorites, we have listed our top 3 templates that you may consider using:

Sprint Planning Meeting
Quarterly Check In
Content Strategy

At Old Street, we love to improve data visualization and tracking in Confluence. For this reason, we've further optimized our favorite templates with charts and live reports to help you understand your data at one glance.

Sprint Planning Meeting

Sprints are the foundation of your team's Agile process. The Sprint Planning Meeting template lets you create a structure for setting your sprint goals and plan your team capacity.

Here are some of the best features of this template:

Sprint planning checklist - Meeting participants can highlight key topics for discussion and prioritization;

Sprint team members - It lists down the meeting participants;

Agenda - Before the meeting, you could add here the relevant items for discussion;

Action items and capacity planning - Team members are responsible for calculating their capacity as well as the type and number of tasks they can work on in the next sprint.

It's not uncommon for members to overload, that's why it's important to check the current sprint's key metrics before the meeting. In particular, it's important to check members' availability and unfinished tasks. You may also want to see your sprint report over the past three months to gain insight into your current performance and use the data for your sprint planning.

When it comes to pulling your sprint data, the Custom Jira Charts for Confluence comes in handy.

In the above example, we've created a simple 2D bar chart that shows the total number of issues corresponding to each status. It can give you an idea on how much you have accomplished for each sprint. It's important to note that in the bar chart, you can click each color block to see all issues under that particular block.

Moreover, we understand that it's a bit challenging to accurately estimate capacity. This is where the Team Capacity Live Report can be useful. You can use it to see the real-time progress of your team members.

To create the sample charts, we first made a Jira Filter for each team member. We use Project + Assignee filters as the Source for the Custom Charts. Next we used the 2D grouped bar chart to create a Status bar chart for each member. Tip: Hide the unnecessary elements for a cleaner look.

Quarterly Check In

This template is useful for quarterly performance reviews. It provides team leaders or managers an efficient way of sharing a member's quarterly progress, to discuss performances and areas for improvement, and to set goals for the next quarter.

Quarterly Check In template contains step-by-step instructions on how a team member can stay aligned with the team for better collaboration. You can further improve this by incorporating Custom Jira Charts for Confluence to show individual performance.

In our example, we created a Quarterly Check In page for a member by first highlighting their accomplishments from the previous quarter. It's a good starting point for a discussion. You can easily achieve this by creating a bar chart showing the number of issues assigned to the member in the last three sprints. This was followed by the basic template that includes Reflections > Goals and Priorities > Feedback.

Content Strategy

A great content plan enables you to connect business goals with measurable results. This is where you can use a Content Strategy template.

Keeping the original structure of the Content Strategy template, you can add custom charts that define your measurable goals.

In the page we've created using the Content Strategy template, we've added a live yearly progress report using a tile chart. It makes it easier to see the number of issues under each status in one glance. If you want to pull reports for a particular status, simply click the tile chart corresponding to it.

Conclusion

We only showed how you can spice up our top 3 Confluence templates using our Custom Jira Charts for Confluence. They make your page easier to understand and navigate for the users. With the addition of Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, you would be able to communicate your numbers clearly and more effectively.