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Adopting well-defined business process management (BPM) is crucial for minimizing delays and maximizing team performance.
Atlassian tools, like Jira and Confluence, play an essential role in establishing and supporting such processes. While they serve different purposes, both tools can bring value depending on your team’s needs, goals, and the nature of a task.
In this article, I’ll explain each tool’s strengths and which to use in which cases.
Differences between Jira and Confluence in BPM
What is Confluence?
Initially launched as a documentation tool, Confluence has evolved into a collaborative platform for teams to create and manage knowledge bases, outline project plans, and enhance team collaboration. Confluence pages enable real-time editing, commenting, and tagging, streamlining teamwork and ensuring transparency. With built-in AI features, teams can summarize content, extract key details, and refine communication more efficiently.
At TitanApps, we use Confluence as a handbook to share critical knowledge. For example, the HR team has created a comprehensive guide for sourcing candidates on LinkedIn. This guide includes different sections that explain:
- Boolean search techniques.
- Strategic filtering methods.
- Best practices for engaging with potential hires.
This detailed article helps new team members follow a structured approach without relying on oral instructions or ad hoc training. By centralizing this knowledge in Confluence, the HR team reduces onboarding time and ensures consistency across hiring processes.
While Confluence is excellent for creating step-by-step guides and supporting collaborative knowledge sharing, it has limitations when used for more complex BPM needs.
Confluence lacks actionable workflows, dynamic task dependencies, and detailed process tracking. Managing iterative processes or multi-stage collaboration often becomes inefficient, as teams must manually create tasks or issues for recurring processes, leading to distractions from core work. To overcome these challenges, teams can use Jira.
Managing processes in Jira
Jira is a powerful, agile project management tool designed to support workflows involving multiple stages, transitions, and stakeholders. Teams can use Jira software to implement agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban, track process lifecycles, and ensure transparency. Add-ons from the Atlassian marketplace can further enhance Jira’s extensive functionality.
However, the downside of Jira’s extensive customization and features is that new users often need a steep learning curve. Additionally, while the tool is great for all of the things described, it still lacks a native function for documenting process management, even if you have Jira Premium or Advanced.
Of course, there are workarounds, such as automations or issue cloning, but these approaches often result in fragmented solutions that need more clarity for effective process management.
The good news is that TitanApps offers tools for business process automation in Jira, enabling teams to move projects forward and overcome such issues.
Improving BPM with Smart Templates and Smart Checklist
Smart Templates allow teams to standardize and automate recurring tasks by creating detailed, reusable issue templates. With these templates, teams can ensure that every process follows the same structure, reducing the risk of errors and keeping consistent workflows.
This is especially useful in scenarios where multiple stages or stakeholders are involved and where repetitive tasks need to be documented clearly. With Smart Templates, users can also:
- Avoid manual data entry by pre-filling fields such as issue summary, description, and assignee.
- Add variables to templates to manage dynamic values, enabling automated team member assignments and due date calculations.
- Use the built-in scheduler and automations to create issues, ensuring tasks are generated at the right time without additional manual steps.
Additionally, Smart Templates improve process management by centralizing workflows in one place. This enables teams to easily access, update, visualize, and refine processes, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tools such as Confluence, Google Drive, or other third-party platforms.
At TitanApps, our team uses Smart Templates to manage various processes. For instance, when it comes to finances, the tool helps in the following ways:
- Tax Form Submission: Managing annual tax forms, such as the IRS 1099 Form, can be tedious and error-prone. Each year, this form needs to be submitted to the IRS, requiring a series of steps like collecting W-9 forms, verifying contract details, and submitting finalized reports.
A Smart Template streamlines this process by organizing all the required tasks into an actionable checklist, pre-filling fields with relevant data. This not only saves time but also minimizes compliance risks.
- Payroll Management: Processing payroll is a critical and complex task for any finance team, particularly in large organizations with multiple contractors or departments.
Smart Templates help with payroll workflows by codifying every step, from validating contractor and tax information to computing net pay and submitting required returns.
Automation features, such as scheduled issue creation and dynamic template variables (e.g., {{month}}, {{responsible}}, {{employee-name}}), allow the team to apply one template across all payroll cycles. This reduces manual effort, improves accuracy, and ensures compliance with regulations.
Read the full case study to learn how the finance team saved over 175 working days annually with Smart Templates.
Smart Checklist takes BPM a step further by breaking down tasks into actionable items, ensuring every step is clearly defined and nothing is overlooked. By embedding detailed checklists directly into Jira issues, teams can provide clear instructions, outline the next steps, and track progress. The key features of Smart Checklist allow users to:
- Add custom statuses, use different formatting options, and use a markdown editor to create comprehensive checklists.
- Save checklists as templates for recurring tasks, enabling the entire team to adhere to standardized procedures.
- Automatically attach checklists to issues based on custom workflow setup, saving time and documenting every required action.
Additionally, Smart Checklist integrates with Jira Service Management (JSM), an Atlassian product that streamlines service operations and tracks SLAs. This integration helps teams manage tasks while providing progress visibility to external stakeholders, such as customers, enhancing transparency and trust.
For example, our team uses Smart Checklist to track the progress of long-term processes, such as onboarding. Within the onboarding process, a task like “Grant access to tools” can have its own checklist to ensure all steps are completed (access to email, project management software, shared drives, etc.).
By breaking tasks into smaller, actionable steps, Smart Checklist ensures every detail is accounted for, helping the HR team manage processes efficiently and avoid overlooking anything.
Smart Checklist helps you organize your work with clear ToDo’s. Create checklists, save them as templates, and apply them to recurring tasks with automation.
Managing business processes requires tools that balance collaboration and workflow precision. Confluence stands out for its robust knowledge management capabilities, and Jira provides the structure and tracking needed for complex workflows. When Jira is used in tandem with Smart Tools, the efficiency of your BPM is taken a step further, driving greater productivity through the features offered.
