Jira, unlike more traditional project management tools, uses an agile approach to project development. In fact, Jira is the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. Jira can be used for Scrum and Kanban boards that offer teams collaboration and continuous improvement but it’s Jira Workflows that can really enhance your teamwork.

Every team has its own way of getting a task across the finish line and a workflow is a visual representation of this. Jira workflows are made up of statuses and transitions; they are designed to fit every project or team and help you increase transparency, accountability, and productivity.

When creating a workflow, you can use Jira’s range of templates or create a custom workflow from scratch. However, getting started with workflows can be daunting so we’ve put together these tips to help you transform your teamwork.

Our Jira workflow best practices

Involve stakeholders when creating workflows

The number one tip when building a workflow is to remember who will be using it; the workflow needs to work for them. There may be multiple stakeholders within your team, such as a product manager, software engineer, product designer or content designer. We recommend getting each of them involved in the process of building your workflow.

Once you’ve created the workflow, make sure they have the chance to check it over and highlight any areas that need improvement. If you don’t, you run the risk of creating impractical statuses and transitions and you may even miss workflow rules that could help your team.

Finally, we suggested making stakeholder reviews a continuous process. Workflows are always evolving and it’s important that they grow with your team.

Keep your workflow agile

The thing that sets Jira apart from the rest is its native agile processes. Your workflow should change and adapt as your teams and processes evolve. When it comes to Jira, everything is iterative and you don’t have to worry about perfecting workflows the first time.

This is where your team’s feedback is invaluable - they’re the ones working with Jira so they know where changes are needed. Agile may not come easily to your team (they might be more used to a ‘set and forget’ approach). However, it’s worth keeping in mind that workflows serve your team’s needs at the current time so they have to adapt as your needs change.

Create a workflow that works for your team

…not everyone else! Every team has their own set of requirements and not every workflow works for every team. While a certain status and transition may work for one issue type, it might not work for another and some issue types may require specific statuses and transitions, or even restrictions and automations that only work for them.

You can, of course, use workflow templates or duplicate workflows but remember that to maximise potential, your team need a tool made just for them. Putting in the effort to begin with makes it far easier to scale and adapt workflows in the future and opens up the possibilities of what your workflow can be.

Keep your workflow simple

While it may be tempting to add as much information as possible, with Jira there’s actually such a thing as too much detail. Your team have to be able to use and understand your workflow so overusing custom fields can lead to slower response times on Jira issues and avoidable holdups.

Instead, we recommend setting standard practices across your team for workflow customisation to minimise compatibility issues. Whenever something is added to or changed in your workflow, you should be thinking back to how this will affect your team, and therefore, affect your customers.

Each status and transition you include creates more complexity for your team. After mapping out how your team works, limit the number of statuses and transitions and focus on the ones that mean the most to your team. A simple structure is often more effective.

Test your workflow

Testing Jira workflows as you create them is a fine balance. If you don’t test them enough, your errors will build up, creating a bigger set of problems for you to fix. However, testing too much and too early in the process can hinder your progress and you won’t be able to move as quickly as you’d like.

Two ways to test effectively is to either test before you pass the workflow onto your team in a separate Jira project or instance. Or, test with your team in your actual project. This testing can become continuous and part of the agile process outlined above.

Make use of Jira apps

Jira workflows can be enhanced by the large number of apps available on Atlassian Marketplace. In fact, there are over 3,000 apps, add-ons and plugins that can be adapted to suit the needs of your team.

Take our app, Crumbs, for example. It is the simple CRM for Jira that lets you see customer information in context by linking a Jira issue to a customer. Unified customer data in Crumbs is accessible to Sales, Marketing, and pretty much any other function you can think of!

You can check out some more of our favourite Jira apps in our blog - How to get the most out of Jira Cloud with Integrations.

Stick to these tips, and you’ll have workflows that help your team increase transparency, accountability, and productivity. For more advice or Jira help, get in touch and we can answer all your questions.

Atlassian tools are built to facilitate collaboration and productivity; most importantly, they’re built to work together. Pairing together Jira Software and Jira Service Management has the potential to unite your teams and enhance your IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows.

In this blog, we’re examining the benefits of integrating Jira Software and Jira Service Management, and also explaining how to get the most out of combining these two tools.

Overview of both tools

While there are similarities between Jira Software and Jira Service Management, they serve different purposes for your team.

Jira Software, also referred to simply as Jira, is the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. It is a task management tool that adopts agile practices through Scrum or Kanban boards. Jira keeps your teams organised and in sync with roadmaps and reporting and insights.

Jira Service Management, or JSM for short, is a service desk tool that has capabilities for ITSM practices like request, incident, problem, change, and configuration management. It operates using customer portals, agent queues, support rotas and service catalogues to provide a single view of the support workflow.

Why integrate Jira Software and Jira Service Management?

Optimise visibility into service requests

Using Jira and Jira Service Management together synergises your operations, IT and dev teams; it gives them visibility into service requests as the two tools can create a self-service customer portal. Jira Service Management offers an intuitive self-service portal for feature requests, bugs, incidents and other customer requests for dev teams. Whether these requests are logged through a service portal, email, embeddable widget, chat, or API, the work can then be streamlined into triaging tickets for the dev team on a Jira board.

In addition to this, your teams can easily share or link issues between Jira and Jira Service Management for quick and simple collaboration at scale. This can be enhanced even further by Jira’s native automation tools that can be used to create, link, and comment on issues across Jira and Jira Service Management projects.

Quickly resolve incidents

The multi-channel support provided when using Jira and Jira Service Management means that you can offer support to customers, wherever they are - whether it’s through email, widget or chat. The tools enable your teams to work together to resolve incidents faster and restore critical services with the one-click major incident escalations in Jira Service Management. On-call scheduling, alerts, incident conference calls, chat channels, and the incident investigation view are all available options teams can use for urgent issues to ensure the right people are given the right information to resolve the problems.

The integration of the tools can also help you deliver on SLAs by prioritising tasks and sending alerts before you breach. On top of this, you can use Jira’s out-of-the-box automation rules or build your own for those repetitive tasks, freeing up your agents to focus on the more important stuff!

Accelerate development work

The change management features that Jira Service Management boasts can remove blockers for development teams and enhances workflows by automating changes. Once again, automation can lighten teams’ workloads with automated change risk assessments, and advanced approval workflows.

Additionally, Jira Service Management offers integration features like deployment tracking and gating using CI/CD tools like Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, CircleCI, and Octopus Deploy.

Improve over time

Using Jira Service Management’s dedicated support metrics, you can track your team’s performance over time. Capture the metrics that matter to you such as mean time to resolution (MTTR), team productivity, customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and more so you can analyse performance and make improvements where needed.

Get started with Jira Software and Jira Service Management today

Using both Jira Software and Jira Service Management together can unite your IT, operations and dev teams to enhance your ITSM and issue resolution. Integrating the two tools improves your teams’ visibility over work and assists collaboration and automation so that tickets are quickly resolved.

If you want to explore integrating Jira Software and Jira Service Management then contact our team who can help create a solution that suits your needs. As an Atlassian Solution Partner, New Verve can help your team get the most out of Atlassian tools.

Last week (18 - 20 April 2023) Atlassian held its annual flagship event in Las Vegas. Team ‘23 is “the ultimate event for modern teamwork” and featured keynote speeches and breakout sessions covering agile and DevOps, ITSM, work management and teams and culture.

The theme of this year’s conference was Impossible Alone. Atlassian products utilise the power of teamwork and collaboration to make the seemingly impossibility a reality.

If you weren’t lucky enough to visit the event in person, here are the big updates from Team ‘23 that you need to know.

Updates from the event

Atlassian Intelligence

One of the most exciting updates from Team ‘23 was the announcement of Atlassian Intelligence. Atlassian invited us to meet our “new virtual teammate” - an AI tool that deeply understands how you collaborate to accelerate work. Atlassian Intelligence will be built into the Atlassian Cloud platform, leveraging AI through internal models and their collaboration with OpenAI.

Some of Atlassian Intelligence’s capabilities include:

• An always-on, virtual teammate in Jira Service Management that can automate support workflows and combine with their chat feature to bring together historical request data and AI to deliver instant support.
• Copywriting and note-taking assistance with the ability to generate new content using natural language prompts, e.g. it could create a press release based on product specifications in Confluence.
• The ability to accelerate work by summarising and extracting information from content
• An on-demand glossary, dictionary, and knowledge graph created using your data to build a shared context of teams, projects, acronyms, and unique, bespoke language.
• Support for natural language questions looking for information in Confluence, as well as a JQL or SQL search converter that can be used across Jira Cloud products.

You can sign up for early access to help shape the tool for wider release.

Confluence updates

Confluence was really having a moment at Team ‘23; Atlassian announced lots of new features that are coming to the tool.

Confluence Whiteboards are a simple, digital whiteboard tool built to use within Confluence. Brainstorm and visualise work freely using sticky notes, shapes, stamps, stickers, timers, and a pen then transform those notes into deliverables like Jira issues and Confluence pages.

The waitlist is now open to try the Early Access Program.

Atlassian has introduced Confluence Databases - a powerful tool that you can use to connect and track work. Through dynamic database tables, your team can connect and organise information including Jira tasks, Confluence pages, owners, due dates, statuses, and more.

Again, you can join the waitlist for the beta, coming soon.

Confluence’s external collaboration capabilities have also been updated. Now, you can collaborate and move work forward more efficiently by adding guests to a Confluence space and sharing view-only Confluence pages with anyone using public links. Additionally, Atlassian has partnered with their Atlassian Ventures portfolio company, Hypothesis, to enable collaboration anywhere, and the new Chrome extension lets Confluence users comment in browser windows just as they would inside Confluence.

Automation for Confluence removes the manual overhead of simple repetitive tasks. It works in the background to complete routine functions that would otherwise have to be done manually so instead admins can focus more on mission-critical work. You can even use pre-built rule templates for popular Confluence actions such as:

• Sending team updates on work progress
• Reminding people about incomplete tasks
• Auto-archiving outdated or inactive content
• Auto-labelling or find-and-replace page labels

Learn more about Confluence automation.

Atlassian Analytics

Atlassian Analytics is now generally available and is included in Cloud Enterprise plans for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. Atlassian Analytics is a data visualisation tool that assists you in making data-driven decisions for DevOps, IT, and business teams.

The tool provides teams with:

• Power insights on prioritisation, resourcing, and the value of work from dashboard templates or through highly customised visualisations using the low-code, no-code editor.
• A unified data experience across Atlassian with near real-time access directly inside Atlassian tools or soon within your BI tool of choice, all while reducing ETL costs.
• Holistic insights across your ecosystem of work including operational, development, financial or customer data can be visualised alongside Atlassian data to evaluate the impact of your team’s work.

Learn more about Atlassian Analytics.

Practice offering updates

Atlassian has refreshed its best practices offering. With their Ways of Working offering they’re teaching us the lessons they’ve learned about modern teamwork by making their Modern Work Coaches, the Atlassian Team Playbook, product templates, practices-focused Atlassian University courses, and more available for free and accessible to any team whether you’re a customer, or not. All with their aim of “unleashing the potential of every team.”

Read more about Atlassian’s Ways of Working offering.

Smart links enhancements

Smart Links help connect all of your work without switching context and now they are expanding their capabilities to include even more Atlassian tools like Trello and Atlassian Analytics. Plus, they’ve added integrations like Dovetail and Amplitude and enhanced functionality including aggregation, creation, and link search and insertion.

Watch Team ‘23 content online

All the sessions from Atlassian Team ’23 are available on demand on their online event page for you to watch and share with your teammates.

Along with the keynote speeches, there are a number of breakout sessions covering open work management, ITSM, teamwork culture and more. Here are some of our favourite watches:

• Chaos to Collaboration: Bringing cross-functional teams together with Confluence
• Break down silos without breaking the bank
• DevOps best practices to better manage your Jira instances
• How to unlock high-velocity teams with Jira Service Management
• Upgrade your meeting management with Confluence

We’re excited about these new updates and we know you will be too. If you have any comments, questions or even concerns about the Team ‘23 announcements, get in touch and we’d love to chat through them with you.

We wanted to formalise our commitment to these aspects of the workplace, so we have set out a brand-new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion strategy to be achieved this year.

Our Approach to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

As a company in the tech sector, we know how important it is to hire thoughtfully and create a culture with diversity at its core. According to PwC, just 5% of leadership roles in tech are held by people identifying as women and research by Tech Nation shows that only 15.8% of people working in tech identify as BAME. Figures on neurodiversity in tech are less reliable, as not every employee feels comfortable disclosing, however one-in-seven of the UK population identifies as neurodiverse.

While systemic issues have a role to play in the underrepresentation of these groups in tech, we feel that we have a moral obligation to do our part. In our formalised strategy, we’ve identified areas of our culture, recruitment processes, and enablement that we want to improve to benefit everyone in our workplace.

It’s essential for us to tackle unconscious bias and diversify our hiring practices, as well as to create an encouraging culture for all of our employees. We’re proud to offer enhanced maternity, menstrual and miscarriage leave, have women represented in leadership roles, and undertake work to address the gender pay gap. However, this is just the start for us and we intend to continue to grow our commitment to diversity.

This is an excellent time for us to evaluate how we hire, the makeup of our hiring panels, the enablement we offer our employees, and how we champion minority voices overall. Not only do we want to encourage diverse candidates at the hiring stage, but we also want to enhance the environment that allows those voices to be heard and respected.

This benefits us too - as studies show that diverse workforces are able to unlock new ways of working and efficiencies. While it’s not our primary goal with this strategy, we believe that supporting all employees will lead to improved outcomes for everyone.

Our Marketing Manager, Louise Reilly, is heading up this strategy; she had this to say about our approach:

Equality, diversity and inclusion are significant causes for me - not only as a woman working in a male-dominated field, but also as a manager who has the ability to foster change in our organisation to make it more inclusive for all of our colleagues. I’m delighted to be working on this strategy and hope to be a positive force for good in the long term.

Careers at New Verve Consulting

If you’d like to learn more about how we work at New Verve Consulting or are interested in joining our team, head over to our careers page. We encourage applications from all candidates and are happy to tailor the process for individual needs; we’re also a Disability Confident employer.

Well, we’re here to help! These tools allow you to build your company knowledge base, share internal documentation, create employee onboarding checklists, and more. We’re going to compare the features, collaboration capabilities and price to help your team pick the tool that’s right for you.

An introduction to the tools

Confluence is Atlassian’s wiki offering and having launched in 2004, it’s gained a pretty loyal following over the years. Confluence is a remote-friendly team workspace where teams can build, organise, and collaborate in one place.

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform launched by Microsoft. The tool is used as a document management and storage system but is highly configurable and can be customised across organisations.

Notion is a productivity and note-taking web tool developed by Notion Labs Inc. It offers collaborative organisation capabilities that allow you to centralise your knowledge.

Finally, Google Docs is an online word processor and collaboration tool from Google. It offers remote collaboration and a sharable document database.

Collaboration

A large part of the appeal of these tools is their collaboration capabilities; each of these apps provide real-time co-editing and inline comments, which facilitate your team working together from anywhere. However, they each have their own collaboration strengths and weaknesses.

Sharepoint does have built-in approval workflows to get the signoffs from stakeholders but Confluence’s content is open by default and easily discoverable to anyone in the team. Don’t worry though, Confluence does offer the functionality to close page permissions so that confidential information can be kept that way.

With Google Docs, files can also easily be shared however this has to be done manually, potentially leading to missing unshared files.

Unlike Notion (which enables editing on all content by default) Confluence has a draft and a published mode, making it easier to prevent accidental edits. Notion control features are also limited compared to Confluence, in which you can create permissions, set controls, and assign admins roles across all paid plans. Plus Confluence’s unlimited page history compared to Notion’s just sever days means any accidental changes that are made can easily be reverted.

Confluence’s open structure allows teams to create a single source of truth that can be shared across the entire company while getting instant feedback with comments, activity feeds, home, and more.

Structure

Confluence, SharePoint, Notion and Google Docs are all structured differently and can provide varying degrees of functionality.

Confluence provides a clean, intuitive interface that is easy to get the hang of. It has simple top navigation and page tree for organisation, plus a homepage with an activity feed and recent work alongside a powerful search bar so you can always find what you’re looking for. The tool is easily scalable too so it can grow with your company.

While SharePoint also offers a full-featured intranet platform with visual customisation options, these features come with a steep learning curve that takes some getting used to. This additional functionality SharePoint can provide is powerful but it may not work for every team and certainly doesn’t provide an out-of-the-box set-up.

Notion offers everything from databases to kanban boards but as the tool grows, information becomes harder to find. In Confluence, spaces are organised and old pages can be archived, keeping information easily searchable and accessible leading to 96% of people who used Notion saying Confluence is more scalable across the entire organisation.

Similarly to Confluence, Google Docs has a searchable shared drive so your team can share and save documents in organised folders. However, this is a simple offering that requires manual set-up and lacks the more advanced features that make your life easier.

Integrations

One way to power up your tools is through integrations and all these apps have their own database of useful tools and apps that can be added on.

Confluence, of course, seamlessly integrates with other Atlassian products, such as Jira and Trello, which makes it easy to manage projects and document them in parallel. However, it also integrates with popular tools such as Google Drive, Slack, Miro, Microsoft Teams, Refined Toolkit, ScriptRunner, and Draw.io with 600+ new apps being added to Atlassian Marketplace every year. The integration possibilities with Confluence are endless.

SharePoint natively integrates with Microsoft Office products including OneDrive but, like Confluence, there’s also a range of external products that can be explored on Microsoft AppSource.

You can find all the Google Docs add-ons in the Google Workspace Marketplace, including writing tools such as Grammarly or SEMrush. Google Docs also provides powerful interactive tools that allow you to import different files such as Microsoft Word or PDFs and easily and instantly edit them with Docs.

Similarly, Notion provides in-house integrations for Atlassian products, Google Drive and OneDrive, alongside its marketplace of partner-made integrations. However, these are not extensive and in fact, 95% of Confluence customers who also used Notion said Confluence’s integrations with other tools are better.

Customisation

The beauty of these tools is that your team can customise them to suit your needs, however, not all tools come with the same levels of functionality.

Confluence comes with a full template library included with every plan and provides an out-of-the-box setup for admins that can be easily personalised. It boasts an intuitive content organisation and, as mentioned, integrates with a wide range of collaboration tools to take things to the next step of customisation.

Google Docs also has extensive and flexible formatting features and a library of templates that allow you to create the documents you need. However, Google Docs is primarily designed for document collaboration, whereas Confluence can be used for a variety of different specialised use cases.

SharePoint offers editor templates as well, along with native simple customisations. However, like Google Docs, SharePoint content creation is limited to certain file formats so it doesn’t have the flexibility of Confluence.

Finally, Notion has a range of templates to choose from, as well as extensive customisation features, however, these can take some time to set up and don’t come as intuitively as with Confluence.

Price

Cost is always an important factor when comparing business tools and documentation tools are no different. So here’s the breakdown of prices for each of the compared tools:

• Confluence is always free for up to 10 users then additional users are $5.50 per user per month
• SharePoint costs $5.00 per user per month
• Notion also has a free tier for up to 10 guests but then starts at $8 per user per month
• Google Docs is free for an individual plan but a team plan starts at $6 per user per month

Roundup

All the tools we’ve compared offer their own benefits and drawbacks but for many years now, Confluence dominated the market of online collaboration and documentation tools and for good reason! Confluence is a powerful team documentation tool. It enables you to set up your private wiki or internal knowledge base, create an employee handbook, collaborate on docs and meeting notes, organise your project documentation, and much more.

Not only that but Confluence is a robust project management tool, that drives collaboration at every step.

Take a look at our products page if you want more information about getting started with Confluence. Or, if you need any help along the way, you can speak to one of our Confluence experts.

Now with the REST API, Crumbs can be customized to help align your teams and processes, solving all of your customer data management problems.

Here are four of our favourite use cases that illustrate the value that Crumbs can bring to your Jira instance:

1. Use our Simple CRM to automatically link customers to a portal

Problem

When a single portal is used to offer support for multiple customers, agents need to manually associate customers and organizations based on the reporter’s email address domain before being able to see the customer’s details.

A solution is required to link the customer to the request automatically.

Solution

By storing the domain in a field in Crumbs, an automation engine can read the field for each customer and assign it to the correct customer.

The automation engine can be built with Atlassian Forge or on any cloud platform of your choice, like AWS.

Outcome

Agents no longer need to manually link a customer to a portal and can instantly access the customer details saving your team time and money. Not only that but now your data is from a single source of truth so customer information can easily be used to inform support such as notifying SLAs.

2. Automatically sort JSM requests to the correct user for approval

Problem

Customers have different approvers and JSM agents need to manually add approvers to requests based on the customer. Therefore, a solution is required to add approvers to requests.

Solution

With an approvers field in Crumbs, the Crumbs API can be used to read the users and populate it into a Jira custom field. Workflows can be configured to allow only users of the field to transition the issue.

In conjunction with Jira Service Management, approvers can use the customer portal to approve requests.

Outcome

Users can now raise requests and associated approvers can approve (or decline) requests. Not only that but using Crumbs in this way streamlines and automates the workflow, making for speedier resolutions on approvals.

3. Automatically link sales and operations

Problem

Operations are not aligned with the sales team on the budget spent and reporting is difficult across multiple customers and their issues.

Solution

Automate the creation of issues using Jira automation with the Crumbs customer automatically linked between a sales pipeline and production workflows.

Outcome

Not only does this save time on creating issues and linking customers to issues, but teams are now aligned on customer details and context. You can also quickly report on issues using the Crumbs issue search.

4. Use Crumbs to link an external CRM to Jira

Problem

An external CRM is used to manage customers and currently needs to manually synchronise the customer list to Crumbs so that it can be linked to Jira issues.

Solution

Using the endpoints, a middleware can be built to integrate with the external CRM and Crumbs.

Outcome

This solution can save you time by removing the manual synchronising of customers and can reduce any errors when synchronising to Crumbs.

Do these use cases sound like they could help your team? Try Crumbs CRM for Jira for FREE on Atlassian Marketplace and find out first-hand how the app can enhance your customer information management.

If you’ve created an API use case of your own then get in touch to share. We’d love to hear how Crumbs has helped your team.

With Jira, your team can streamline your processes with simple and elegant workflows. However, with Jira integrations, you can take things to the next level! Atlassian enables multiple useful integrations that mean you can power up your Jira instance.

The various Jira integrations span over 3,000 apps, add-ons and plugins that can be adapted to suit the needs of your team.

Why integrate?

By integrating your favourite tools, you can spend less time on mundane tasks and more time focusing on the things you do best. The sheer number of Jira Software integrations available means that your team can create a solution that solves all of your problems.

Not only could you see an increase in productivity by focusing only on more business-critical work but your team save valuable time. In fact, Atlassian reports that on average, software developers check 3.3 tools simply to discover the status of a project, while Jira Software customers rely on fewer tools (2.3 tools).

What can you integrate?

As mentioned, there are over 3,000 possibilities when it comes to Jira Cloud integrations. Partnering with companies like Microsoft, Google and Zoom - Atlassian has options to integrate with best-in-class technology. On top of this, you can continue using the technology you know and love but now with more efficiency.

Check out a few of the integrations that Team New Verve love:

Slack

The popular workplace messaging app combines with Jira projects to keep your team up to date and stores all the project information in one place. This pairing lets you know when Jira issues are created, updated, commented on, and more. However, by filtering notifications, you can decide what your team sees and choose the updates that matter most to you.

That’s not all - you can now create Jira issues directly from Slack. And the best part? It takes seconds to set up!

Crumbs

Crumbs is the simple CRM for Jira that lets you see customer information in context. By linking a Jira issue to a customer in Crumbs you remove the need for users to navigate to an external CRM - all the customer details you want are right where you need them!

Plus, you can use fields to capture the customer information that is relevant to your team. Create your own custom fields and group them into sections so that your business and support teams can find useful information easily.

Gliffy

As the saying goes “a picture speaks a thousand words” and with Gliffy you can easily draw diagrams on Jira tickets to help you share ideas and resolve issues faster than before.

With their easy-to-use, drag & drop diagram tool, you can bring your Jira tickets to life. No need for any training as the high levels of detail, intuitive interface and automatic updates provide your team with everything they need to start drawing straight away.

How to integrate?

Atlassian Marketplace is home to all your integration needs. From popular best sellers to niche problem solvers, the marketplace has it all! And don’t worry about these breaking the bank, many of the integrations are free or competitively priced.

You can easily search and discover apps that work for your team, plus it’s simple to look for the apps you already use and get them connected to your Jira.

The rating system and customer reviews provide an extra level of reassurance and let you see what teams like yours are enjoying. Simply search for top-rated or trending apps and find out what’s got the Atlassian community buzzing.

Jira Cloud integrations help your team get work done. Why stop at the first step when you can integrate the best of the best apps and get more out of your tools?

Take a look through the many options you have on Atlassian Marketplace. Or, you can get in touch with New Verve and - with our extensive knowledge of Atlassian tooling - we can give you a nudge in the right direction.

The purchase of our company represents the latest step in the international expansion process of the Spanish technology company, which in the last few years has opened offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, and Portugal, as well as a development centre in Uruguay. With this acquisition, the company seeks to continue growing, having closed 2021 with a turnover of 97.3 million euros - 23% more than the previous year.

Having been in the market since 1994, atSistemas offers innovative solutions and accompanies more than 500 clients in their Digital Transformation. From its offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Cádiz, A Coruña, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Mallorca, Zaragoza, Huelva, Valencia, Milan, Lisbon, Montevideo, Miami and London, it carries out architecture, development, systems integration and managed services projects, adopting and promoting the best practices in the market. It also works on international projects in Germany, Belgium, United Arab Emirates, the United States, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Romania and Sweden. atSistemas is an “Agile First” company, acting with the flexibility of a start-up through the ecosystem of its 21 Expert Centres, a perfect collaborative environment for innovation and technological excellence

“With the acquisition of New Verve Consulting, we have significantly strengthened our commitment to becoming a global partner of the Atlassian ecosystem and positioned our company in the UK market, both of which are main priorities in our global strategy. This is also the first step in the inorganic growth initiative defined in our current 2021-2024 strategic plan.

“We are confident that the numerous synergies between New Verve Consulting and atSistemas will allow us to offer the maximum value to our customers and the greatest possibilities of joint growth for our professionals” says José Manuel Rufino Fernández, Co-owner and CEO of atSistemas.

Our team at New Verve Consulting specialises in Atlassian software and is the only channel partner in Scotland. Alongside this specialisation, we have been expanding our solution portfolio by developing proprietary products such as Crumbs, a customer management solution for Jira.

With this purchase, atSistemas increases its international presence by offering local expertise and support. This also follows its entry into the UK earlier this year with the opening of offices in the London capital.

“I would like to welcome all the great professionals that make up New Verve Consulting. With you, we will achieve a new boost of our “at family” and the positioning we have been pursuing for some time in the UK. In addition, with our union, we will reach a greater number of clients in both geographies, increasing our capabilities to lead large projects and offering better opportunities to our employees. With the acquisition of New Verve, atSistemas takes an important step in the relationship with our customers in the UK, incorporating local services from the Atlassian ecosystem” says Miguel Ángel Sacristán Salvador, Co-Owner & CSO of atSistemas.

The acquisition’s objective is to accelerate the growth of atSistemas in the UK, the European market with the highest volume of business in the IT sector, followed by Germany and France, in parallel with the company’s organic expansion plan, taking advantage of the opportunities and emerging trends in the sector. atSistemas will incorporate New Verve’s service portfolio into its existing one, thus expanding its offer and covering the demand for the needs of UK-based companies.

Nigel Rochford, Founder of New Verve Consulting states “It’s fantastic to see New Verve Consulting become part of the atSistemas group.

“Since starting the company in 2011, New Verve Consulting has evolved a huge deal and I’m immensely proud to see all of our hard work realised with this acquisition. On a personal note, I’ve loved every moment of the journey so far and am incredibly lucky to have worked with and learned from so many talented people over the years.

“As an entrepreneur, I’m delighted to reach this milestone with a company as successful as atSistemas acquiring the organisation that our team has worked so hard to build. The team at New Verve Consulting is its greatest asset and I can’t wait to see them prosper as part of this group.“

This is a significant and exciting milestone in our journey as a business and we’re excited to see where the future takes us with atSistemas.

By each of us participating and taking advantage of this great opportunity we are feeding into the Community Giving strategy and helping New Verve to give back to the community as a team. Some of the many benefits of community giving are improving our well-being, increasing engagement and retention by leading with purpose, and many more.

We were also partnered with the Social Good Connect platform to help us on this exciting new journey and we used the platform to find volunteering roles that aligned with our strategy and policies. This platform made it easy, with their search and match technology, to find volunteering roles that matched our interests and skills. One of the many benefits of using this platform was that there were remote and in-person volunteering opportunities.

Today we bring you our first blog from our Community Giving Champion, Lana Nesredin, one of the many in a series of Community Giving Day posts. Lana shares her experience and thoughts on the charity and the role she volunteered for.

1. What volunteer role did you undertake?

I chose the Social Media Officer volunteer role to help Citizens of Cyber charity. The role’s key responsibilities are to create content, find new ideas for content creation, and grow their social media channels to reach large audiences.

The charity helps create content that can bring awareness and information to everyone in the online community especially those who are vulnerable to cybercrime.

2. Why did you choose this volunteering opportunity?

I chose this role because of the impact that I can create for the charity. The charity relies on social media to publish useful content that can help their audience avoid the pitfalls of cybercrime.

When I started the role the charity had already set up their social media accounts however, there was little content published and not enough audience reach. I found this to be a great opportunity to help the charity to reach as large an audience as possible in the hopes that someone will see it and it will save them from being a victim of cybercrime.

Another reason why I chose this role as I wanted to try out the social media side of technology to find out what it’s like to be a Social Media Officer. I have worked in various sectors of Technology as a profession and I was interested in exploring and adding social media to the list. It also has an element of learning to it as I have used social media as an end user but now I am required to approach it from the perspective of an account manager.

3. Why did you pick this charity?

I picked this charity because of their goal to help, support, and educate everyone on cybercrime and to keep them safe while they are online. I admired that the charity aimed to help anyone who is online and I relished the opportunity to spread their message to a large audience.

Also, the team behind the charity are amazing people and have dedicated so much time and effort in creating and growing the charity. It is definitely not an easy journey to create any form of business or charity so I have great admiration for the team and for their effort.

4. How was your Community Giving Day?

The community giving day has been great and I have been continuing my volunteering as it is very flexible. Some days it is about brainstorming ideas for what type of content to create and other days it is about creating the posts and scheduling them. Another aspect of the day is to check the published posts in all the social media channels to make sure they have no errors or issues. Over time when we have lots of content posted, we will then gather analytical data to help us grow the audience reach.

5. What did you learn from your experience?

To list a few things I have learned so far:

• Growing a social media presence takes time and patience.
• Different tools can be used for posting on social media to save you time so that you can work on more important things like how to make the content better or how to reach more people.
• How to be more creative with content ideas and strategies.
• Most of the social media channels offer some form of freebies that charities can use to grow their channels without breaking the budget.
• The team I work with is a team of amazing, ambitious, fun, and smart individuals who all have lots to do in their day to day but still make time to volunteer.

I would recommend if you have some extra time to volunteer then you will find it can be very rewarding.

6. What benefits have you found when volunteering?

It feels great when volunteering as you know that what you do will impact someone in one way or another. You may not always get direct feedback but that is the beauty of volunteering and giving back to the community, which is to provide a service and have no expectation to receive anything in return.

Giving back to the community and volunteering is a form of reward and gratitude that you will experience and only you will understand once you volunteer. We may be spending a few minutes or so to volunteer but that few minutes could be you saving someone from making a wrong life decision, helping a young person carve out their career or their education or saving them from an online scammer.

I will continue to look for more ways to volunteer in the future as the impact you create and the reward you get from volunteering it is priceless.

7. Any final words on your volunteering experience?

I would like to encourage everyone to follow the charity’s social media channels by way of supporting them. Who knows maybe one day the charity will publish content that can help one of our family members, friends, or colleagues to save them from cybercrime and the negative side of the online community.

The charity links are:

Website: Citizens of Cyber

Facebook: /citizensofcyber

Twitter: @citizensofcyber

LinkedIn: /citizens-of-cyber

Instagram: @citizensofcyber

Related Reading

If you enjoyed this blog and want to find out more about New Verve’s commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility read Celebrating Giving Tuesday with Mary’s Meals.

We’d like to introduce you to the New Verve Team Leads!

We recently decided to update our team lead structure and assigned the role to a talented member of each of our teams. Our current team leads are:

• Nigel Rochford - Executive Team
• Kris Siwiec - Project Management Office (PMO)
• Louise Reilly - Marketing
• Victor Lee - Products
• Daniel Vargas Llopis - Solutions Pod
• Jamie McCulloch - Solutions Pod

Team leads are experienced colleagues who drive the team’s focus and oversee day-to-day team operations. This is the latest in a series of steps to move away from line management in favour of a more autonomous team structure.

The role of the Team leads is primarily to provide guidance, enablement, and supervision for their team. This means they are responsible for translating our business vision into tangible team goals, motivating team members by providing support and encouragement, leading team enablement, and helping build team culture.

Read on to find out more about the duties and responsibilities of our Team Leads.

Team building, culture and collaboration

One key reason we created the Team Lead roles was to help facilitate culture and collaboration between each of our remote teams. We’re very aware that working remotely can feel isolating and this may be hard to communicate.

Instead, we established each team and put someone in charge to identify, organise, and promote team-building opportunities, such as ideation sessions, team socials, office days or away days.

Along with the social side of the role, team leads have to execute, implement, and oversee day-to-day team operations, such as stand-ups, show & tells, health checks, or team retros. This gives them a chance to gain some management and mentoring experience while ensuring the delivery of work by their team.

Driving team mission and vision

We believe it’s important for each team to have a specific mission which aligns with our overall business strategy in order to give purpose to and guide the work we do. It is the Team Lead’s responsibility to ensure their team is aware of this mission and is working towards it.

Reporting the progress to the Exec Team, the Team Leads will define, track, and execute annual team goals based on the latest business vision and objectives. Through weekly meetings, team leads and our exec team ensure all teams are on track and help facilitate synergy and collaboration across teams.

In addition to this, it is important that the Team Leads own, maintain, and enforce team-specific processes and standards, such as team values, missions and visions, communication and documentation, delivery of work, or timekeeping. This provides a formal basis for each team member to refer to and to help guide them in their work.

Team development and enablement

Team Leads are key to a team’s enablement and development. It is their responsibility to own, maintain, and implement the team enablement strategy and development plan. This includes not only creating team-wide learning but also facilitating individuals’ knowledge paths based on their own skill gaps and career goals.

Across their own team and the wider company, Team Leads must identify, organise, and promote knowledge-sharing opportunities, such as ecosystem digests and events, skill workshops, or innovation days. These allow team members to consolidate their own learning while sharing it with others and becoming a knowledge source on that subject.

For all team members, Team Leads should be the go-to member of staff to direct them to key sources of information and support, such as policies, guidelines, and HR. In addition to this, Team Leads are in charge of welcoming new members into the team. This includes assigning them with buddies, onboarding them onto our ways of working and integrating them into the day-to-day work. Not only does this provide structure to our onboarding process, but it also provides new starts with a friendly face to go to in those first few weeks.

Not only do these responsibilities help team members’ development but it also provides Team Leads with the chance to create mentoring relationships and coaching opportunities. They are able to move through their own leadership enablement path and gain valuable management experience.

Team health and wellbeing

One of the most important roles of our Team Leads is their support of their team’s health and wellbeing. We encourage our Team Leads to be valuable resources for our teams, signposting useful resources and platforms focused on health and wellbeing, including our EAP, our Wellbeing Champion and our HR partner.

Additionally, we know how isolating remote working can be so we also encourage our teams to reach out to their team lead if their feeling low or simply want a chat to break up the day. Our Team Leads will do a great job of creating a sense of comradery and friendship within the teams.

So, congratulations to all our new Team Leads and we look forward to the impact you will make at New Verve!

If you like the sound of working at New Verve, take a look at our careers page!

Related Reading

If you enjoyed this blog and want to find out more about our remote team then check out the blog The Importance of Work-Life Balance While Working Remotely.