How a major company implements Atlassian tools and Microsoft 365 for Jira

AMAZONEN-WERKE H. Dreyer SE & Co. KG is a German manufacturer of agricultural and municipal machinery. With its headquarters in Hasbergen-Gaste and further development and production sites in Germany, France, Hungary, and Russia, Amazone is a globally active company.

Challenges in the business processes

Due to the size of the company as well as a large number of locations, challenges arise in development and communication, such as a large number of backlogs and a large number of communication channels.

To overcome these challenges, Atlassian tools were evaluated among the project leaders. In particular, Jira software and Confluence were considered. Jira Software was considered as a task management tool and Confluence as a knowledge management tool during the evaluation.

The implementation strategy of Atlassian tools

The challenge for the project was to integrate different ways of working, locations, departments, and languages into one software.

Based on the successful use of Jira in several pilot departments, Jira was defined as the new tool for task management.

The use of Jira has proven to be particularly successful in the areas of task representation and in the logging of work steps.

In order to avoid a hard upheaval in the implementation strategy, the changeover of the affected departments was not to take place at the same time. Here, it was necessary to weigh up whether the implementation should be carried out per team or per project so that the respective processes could be transferred to the new structure without any problems. The decision depended on the respective preference, the company structures and the scope of the existing processes. Within the project for AMAZONEN-WERKE H. Dreyer SE & Co. KG, individual teams were finally transferred to the new structure step by step.

Due to the collaboration of different teams, there were short transitions during the transition in which a project team no longer worked together in one medium. Nevertheless, a uniform way of working was maintained within the teams throughout the entire project phase.

How Microsoft 365 for Jira was used for the implementation

By using Microsoft 365 for Jira, the obstacles that arose in the described procedure could be overcome without any problems.

Regardless of the approach, for example, a media discontinuity arose at certain points, i.e. individual people were still working with their team in the old environment, while colleagues from the project were already working in the implemented new environment. Tasks were therefore not maintained in one system and could therefore be created twice.

With the use of Microsoft 365 for Jira, Jira tickets can be created or linked based on emails in Outlook. This allows people to continue to communicate with each other and keep up to date internally.

When implemented in Jira software, a linking tool called vLinks was used to fulfill various requirements such as creating linked tickets.

This extension also brings some features that greatly simplify the use of linking. For example, through a preset search, only tickets of one type from the current project can be displayed for selection. This serves a categorization of the created tickets.

The categorization is done for a structured overview. The categories are customizable, i.e. the user can create and change the respective headings himself. However, this is not possible with a selection list.

However, the implementation using vLinks had a weakness: Since the field is integrated via an extension, it was not supported by Microsoft 365 for Jira. Users could therefore no longer create tickets in Jira from Outlook without a media break. Tickets had to be reworked, resulting in additional work.

The final solution

Thanks to the cooperation of yasoon and venITure, this problem could be solved. Both apps were adapted accordingly and further developed with the aim of making them compatible with each other.

Within this solution, the media discontinuity could also be eliminated and no further blockers stood in the way of the introduction.