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In a landscape where the success of digital projects relies on agile management and rigorous documentation, Jira and Confluence become indispensable allies. They provide a unified platform to drive each phase, ensure decision traceability, and centralize knowledge. By adopting a structured, repeatable approach, you guarantee alignment between business ambitions and technical deliverables while optimizing collaboration between IT and business teams.
This guide delivers a step-by-step approach to configure, set up, and use Jira for operational management and Confluence for documentation, all illustrated with real-life cases from Swiss companies. The objective: to provide you with a ready-to-use blueprint for your bespoke projects or large-scale transformations.
What Are Jira and Confluence?
Jira and Confluence are two software products developed by Atlassian. They enable project stakeholders to manage different aspects of a project. Jira handles planning and tasks, while Confluence manages centralized documentation.
Jira: Project Management Software for Efficient Task and Workflow Management
Jira is a project management tool designed to organize, plan, and track tasks within teams, particularly in agile environments (Scrum, Kanban). It offers a clear view of progress, priorities, and responsibilities, which enhances coordination and productivity.
Confluence: Centralize Documentation and Foster Collaboration
Confluence is a collaborative platform dedicated to documentation. It allows you to structure specifications, meeting notes, procedures, and decisions in a clear and accessible way. Information is centralized, facilitating knowledge sharing and project continuity.
Understanding and Deploying Jira and Confluence to Kick Off Your Project
Before you begin, prepare your project’s Jira and Confluence spaces. This step ensures a solid operational foundation and a clear documentation structure from the project’s inception.
Project Setup Preparation
Before any configuration, it is essential to define the functional scope and major project phases. This preparation involves bringing together IT and business stakeholders to validate objectives, key metrics, and technical constraints.
A kickoff meeting allows you to list expected deliverables: initial backlog, specification documents, planned sprints, and client sign-off milestones. This formalization reduces the risk of scope creep and forgotten requirements.
One of our recent financial sector clients illustrates this phase: during their core application redesign, teams held three scoping workshops in under a week to consolidate requirements, define Jira roles, and set up the necessary Confluence spaces.
Initial Configuration
Setting up Jira starts with creating a modular project based on an Agile or Kanban template, depending on the mission’s size and type. The issue hierarchy (Epic, Story, Task, Bug) is configured to reflect the desired level of granularity.
Meanwhile, Confluence is structured around project spaces, team spaces, and page templates. Access rights are assigned according to responsibilities: contributors, business approvers, external auditors.
In our financial sector example, the Jira Agile template was adapted to include a “Regulatory Review” issue type—crucial in a highly regulated industry—while Confluence hosted a dedicated folder for Swiss FINMA compliance.
Space Structuring
In Jira, each business component or functional module becomes a “component” or “team” to clearly distribute responsibilities. Custom fields capture project-specific metrics.
In Confluence, parent pages are created for the project plan, backlog, technical documentation, user guides, and feedback tracking. Jira macros dynamically display linked issues.
This synchronized structure offers a single pane of glass: clicking a Jira issue in Confluence opens its detailed view, ensuring coherence and traceability of all changes.
Orchestrating Operational Management with Jira
Once set up to manage your tasks and planning, Jira becomes the cockpit of your project to plan, execute, and measure progress.
Backlog Creation and Management
The initial backlog aggregates all user stories and technical requirements identified during scoping. Each item is written in the standard format (role, action, benefit) to ensure shared understanding.
Priorities are set based on business value and technical complexity, then organized into Epics and releases. Issues are estimated in effort points and placed into a clear workflow.
This approach allows you, for example, to quickly assign story points to critical features of your web or mobile platform, providing immediate visibility into workload and risks.
Sprint Planning and Execution
Each sprint begins with a planning meeting where the team selects the highest-priority stories and defines a sprint goal. Tasks are broken down and assigned to individual members.
During execution, the Scrum or Kanban board offers real-time visibility of issue status: To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done. Daily stand-ups rely on these columns to quickly surface blockers.
In one of our client cases, the team adopted a biweekly cadence with a 15-minute daily touchpoint, reducing delivery times by 20% as of the third sprint.
Reporting and KPI Tracking
Jira includes automated reports: burndown chart, velocity chart, release report, and time spent per issue. These metrics help adjust the roadmap and anticipate delays or overloads.
Dashboard gadgets can be shared with IT leadership for asynchronous monitoring and full transparency on progress.
One industrial manufacturer we supported used Jira KPI tracking to identify a validation bottleneck, leading to a tailored workflow that accelerated review cycles.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support mid-sized and large enterprises in their digital transformation
Leveraging Confluence to Centralize Documentation and Foster Collaboration
Confluence organizes all specifications, feedback, and deliverables in a versioned repository. This creates a single reference point accessible at any time and clarifies business expectations around the product.
Specification Templates
Preconfigured templates cover functional, technical, UX, and performance specifications. Each model includes essential sections: objectives, scope, wireframes, and acceptance criteria.
Macros like decision tables and roadmap planners facilitate milestone tracking and trade-off management.
One client standardized a single template across all project teams, reducing specification writing time by 30% and ensuring the document consistency vital for internal audits. This demonstrates how adopting a Confluence template can boost performance.
Feedback Management and Approval
Confluence allows contextual comments on every document section. Business and technical reviewers can annotate, suggest changes, or flag risks directly on the page.
The built-in approval workflows condition document publication on sign-off by a set number of reviewers, ensuring compliance with internal standards.
In a recent engagement, we implemented a three-step review process (functional review, technical review, legal approval) for each document, complete with timestamped approval history. This greatly accelerated delivery and improved deliverable quality.
Client Portal and Collaboration
A dedicated client space can be configured in Confluence, providing controlled access to specifications, progress reports, and test plans. Client feedback is then centralized and tracked.
This approach ensures a fast, documented feedback loop, boosting trust and transparency throughout the project.
In some cases, this configuration has cut email exchanges in half and maintained a clear audit trail for each change request.
Ensuring Governance, Integration, and End-to-End Traceability
Guarantee compliance, security, and connectivity of your tools for an agile and reliable ecosystem.
Automations and Connectors
Integrating Jira and Confluence with Git, CI/CD, or support tools synchronizes issues, commits, and deployments. Webhooks automate status updates.
No-code connectors link Jira, Confluence, and third-party solutions (test teams, monitoring, CRM).
For example, by deploying an automation that creates bug tickets upon detecting production anomalies, one client improved response times by 40%.
Security and Compliance
ACL settings in Confluence and project permissions in Jira ensure each user sees only what concerns them. Data encryption and SSO authentication strengthen protection.
Confluence page versioning provides a full audit history, essential for internal or external audits.
Audit and Traceability
Jira and Confluence’s native logs record every change, comment, and status transition. These traces can be used for audit reports and post-mortem analyses.
Dedicated dashboards display compliance indicators, approval times, and SLA adherence.
In regulated industries, these reports often reduce process variances and ensure systematic compliance with regulatory requirements.
Optimize Your Projects with Jira and Confluence
By combining a rigorous initial setup, Agile management in Jira, and living documentation in Confluence, you achieve a coherent, transparent, and scalable ecosystem. Each phase, from backlog to approval, finds its place in a clearly defined workflow.
Traceability, security, and bottom-up collaboration strengthen trust between internal teams and external stakeholders. Your project gains agility, visibility, and resilience in the face of digital transformation challenges.
Beyond our ability to manage your end-to-end digital project—from specifications to development and production—our experts are available to adapt this blueprint to your specific context. We support you in defining your roadmap, ensuring a modular, open-source, and evolving approach.
