Atlassian Atlas: first impressions

Atlassian Atlas: first impressions

In my rol as Team Leader I have to be constantly up to date with the progress of my team. And in my obsession to be aware of everything and a little bit of FOMO I love to know what is going on in our department and also in other areas of our company.

For the first thing I try to use all the tools that I find and combine them to get the best out of them: from bots for slack that do the "dirty work" of asking for daily updates of my team members, virtual whiteboards where I try to see a global picture as complete as possible of the status of the different projects in progress, spreadsheets where you can check their progress... even, to cover a specific need, i have create my own issues tracking tool (I will soon publish a tutorial on this ).

Coincidences of destiny I recently received a notification from Atlassian indicating that their new application, ATLAS, was entering public beta and inviting me to try it.

What is ATLAS?

Atlas is the solution that Atlassian has created for intercommunication between the different elements of the company. But i'm not referring to the daily or direct communication that can be achieved via slack or similar, but the continuous stream of information on the progress of each of the departments so that this information is shared by everyone and at all times. Something as simple and important as defining company objectives and constantly updating them (what is going well and what is not working, for example) is achieved in a clear and nice way.

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Each project of each department has its own place so the information is always organized and can be accesed by anyone, anytime. Obviously the integration with the rest of Atlassian products (bitbucket, jira, confluence, trello, etc...) is amazing, so if you already use these tools in your work, it's worth giving it a try.

Hands on

The little that I have been able to try (and by creating several profile) I have liked a lot. Not only because of the taste for the detail of the interface and all the configuration options that allow us to adjust the visibility of all the elements of our projects with a very fine granularity, but also because everything is focused on going straight "to the point". For example: ATLAS forces us to be concise in the updates of the different projects in which we work. And such is the case that it forces us that these updates do not exceed 280 characters, making the list of updates seem like the timeline of Twitter rather than a breakdown of infinite and endless posts.

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And this permeates everything: just thinking of those endless team meetings exposing the progress of each project can be replaced by just taking a look at the respective timelines (and at any time, since it is totally asynchronous) is something which can only be rated as a Win.

I'll try to invite some of my colleagues to play a little more with the tool, but from the little I've used it, it's obvious for what purpose it has been done. And I can only applaud him.

Oh, and it's free. :D