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“Atlassian Development and Collaboration Software Company”

A Professional Report

Presented to Sir John Christian Conejos

of Our Lady of Fatima

University

In Partial Fulfillment

of the requirements for the subject

Science, Technology and Society

By:

Feizhen Mae B. Rodelas

BSACC 1-Y2-1P

March 2021
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INTRODUCTION

Atlassian is an Australian tech giant founded by two college friends, Mike

Cannon- Brookes and Scott Farquhar. The company banks on developmental

and collaborative software creation. Atlassian's central goal is brief and direct: "

Our mission is to unleash the potential in every team," (Atlassian Corp Plc 2016).

In the introductory letter to the 2016 Annual Report, they declare that they " aim

to have every knowledge worker, in every team, in every company use an

Atlassian product every day." (Atlassian Corp Plc 2016) Founded in 2002 to help

programming groups work better together, they created JIRA for group arranging

and task the executives. Not long after JIRA came Confluence, an item for group

content creation and sharing. Today, their portfolio incorporates twelve items

zeroed in various parts of assisting groups with working better.

This report will highlight the key strategies and systems employed by Atlassian

from the beginning of their journey until to what the company is today. The first

part highlights the company’s principles and program and how these continuous

improvement methods and projects were initiated and utilized by the company for

further growth. The second part highlights the initiative undertaken by the

company in its commitment to aid in the battle against an environmental

dilemma. The last part serves as the conclusion and recommendation of the
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report which will provide for the identification of which area of Atlassian requires

the implementation of a

continuous improvement strategy, system, and/or process that will add value to

the way it operates and explain how the stakeholders is involved in determining

the findings and how they will be notified of the recommended strategy, system

and/or process.
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ATLASSIAN: PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION

Atlassian firmly believes in the principle of progress over perfection, the

company aims to improve and develop beyond the standards and constraints of

being the “perfect company.” Atlassian aims to instill gradual changes with long-

term benefits rather than fast-tracked developments with short-term gains.

AGILE TEAM

One of the many commendable continuing improvement systems of

Atlassian is its development and collaborative group, Agile Team. Atlassian’s

Agile Teams are the backbone of every development in the company. They are a

group of individuals assigned in a specific project or cause in creating new

products and offering new services.

Agile, as the company puts it, “is an iterative approach to project management

and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers

faster” (Atlassian 2020). Agile team conveys work in little, yet consumable,

increases. Agile calls for collaborative cross-functional teams. Open

correspondence, coordinated effort, transformation, and trust among colleagues

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are at the core of deft. Although the project head or customer commonly focuses

on the work to be conveyed, the group starts to lead the pack on choosing how

the work will be

completed, self-sorting around granular errands and tasks. Agile isn't

characterized by a bunch of functions or explicit improvement strategies. Instead,

agile is an assemblage of practices that establish a commitment to response

cycles and continuous improvement.

Moreover, the Atlassian Agile Team made sure that in every task it undertakes

the PDCA process is taken into consideration. There are two frameworks

employed by the Agile Team in their project management planning system;

Scrum which “uses fixed-length iterations of work, called sprints. There are four

ceremonies that bring structure to each sprint” (Drumond 2020) and Kanban

which “matches the work to the team's capacity. It's focused on getting things

done as fast as possible, giving teams the ability to react to change even faster

than scrum” (Drumond 2020). Both frameworks are presented below.

.
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1

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT STRATEGIES

1. Kick Start Innovation with Ship It Days - Every quarter Atlassian

gives employees the chance to work on anything that relates to our products and

ship it within 24 hours - hence the name, Ship It Day.

2. Develop Innovative Ideas with 20% Time - 20% Time provides

individuals and teams extended time to think 'outside the box'. Atlassians can

take one day a week or accrue days and take a block of time to work on their

own project.

3. Prototype and Test Ideas - Prototypes allow you to quickly get

feedback from customers and iterate to deliver a brilliant user experience.

Usability testing via paper prototypes is one low cost way to gather this feedback.

1
Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/agile
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management
2
https://www.atlassian.com/kaizen/overview/fostering-an-innovative-culture
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THE FOUR CEREMONIES OF SCRUM

1. Sprint Planning - Sprint planning sets up the entire team for success

throughout the sprint. Coming into the meeting, the product owner will have a

prioritized product backlog. They discuss each item with the development team,

and the group collectively estimates the effort involved. The development team

will then make a sprint forecast outlining how much work the team can complete

from the product backlog. That body of work then becomes the sprint backlog.
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2. Daily Stand-up - Stand-up is designed to quickly inform everyone of

what's going on across the team. It's not a detailed status meeting. The tone

should be light and fun, but informative. Have each team member answer the

following questions;

 What did I complete yesterday?

 What will I work on today?

 Am I blocked by anything?

There's an implicit accountability in reporting what work you completed yesterday

in front of your peers. No one wants to be the team member who is constantly

doing the same thing and not making progress.

3. Iteration review - Iteration review is a time to showcase the work of the

team. They can be in a casual format like "demo Fridays", or in a more formal

meeting structure. This is the time for the team to celebrate their

accomplishments, demonstrate work finished within the iteration, and get

immediate feedback from project stakeholders.

4. Retrospective - Agile is about getting rapid feedback to make the product

and development culture better. Retrospectives help the team understand what

worked well–and what didn't. Retrospectives aren't just a time for complaints

without action.
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ELEMENTS OF A KANBAN BOARD

1. Visual Signals — One of the first things you’ll notice about a kanban

board are the visual cards (stickies, tickets, or otherwise). Kanban teams

write all of their projects and work items onto cards, usually one per card.

For agile teams, each card could encapsulate one user story. Once on the

board, these visual signals help teammates and stakeholders quickly

understand what the team is working on.

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2. Columns — Another hallmark of the kanban board are the columns. Each

column represents a specific activity that together compose a “workflow”.

Cards flow through the workflow until completion. Workflows can be as

simple as “To Do,” “In Progress,” “Complete,” or much more complex.

3. Work in Progress (WIP) Limits — WIP limits are the maximum number

of cards that can be in one column at any given time. A column with a WIP

limit of three cannot have more than three cards in it. When the column is

“maxed-out” the team needs to swarm on those cards and move them

forward before new cards can move into that stage of the workflow. These

WIP limits are critical for exposing bottlenecks in the workflow and

maximizing flow. WIP limits give you an early warning sign that you

committed to too much work.

4. Commitment point — Kanban teams often have a backlog for their

board. This is where customers and teammates put ideas for projects that

the team can pick up when they are ready. The commitment point is the

moment when an idea is picked up by the team and work starts on the

project.

5. Delivery point — The delivery point is the end of a kanban team’s

workflow. For most teams, the delivery point is when the product or

service is in the hands of the customer. The team’s goal is to take cards
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from the commitment point to the delivery point as fast as possible. The

elapsed time

between the two is the called Lead Time. Kanban teams are continuously

improving to decrease their lead time as much as possible.

Jim Benson says that kanban only has two rules: Limit work in progress and

visualize your work. If you start with just those rules and apply them to your work,

your kanban board will look much different than the one described above. And

thats ok! Jim advocates for starting with just these two rules because, he says,

“The more rules you add, the less contexts it fits into.”

3
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/boards#:~:text=David%20Anderson%20established%20that
%20kanban,point%2C%20and%20a%20delivery%20point.
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CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

One of the core programs of Atlassian is its goal to give back to the

community and effect positive change to its stakeholders and to the world.

Pushing through with this goal, Atlassian established a three-step aproach

(Atlassian 2020) to ‘corporate philantrophy.’ The first step is to educate, Atlassian

aims to help disadvantaged youth by gearing them up with the necessary skills

and knlowledge that shall enable them to thrive in the world. The second step is

to enlist which, as Atlassian claims, will “help to bring out the best of business, by

co-founding and supporting the Pledge 1% movement” (Atlassian 2020). The

Pledge 1% movement is a simple method which uses a segment of a pledging

company’s future accomplishment to help non-profits communities. The last step

is to energize, Atlassian builds energy and use it to support our local

communities by empowering each Atlassian with five days of volunteering leave

per year to make an impact. As a result, the Atlassian Foundation “ended the

year with 22,900 volunteer hours by 3,330 Atlassians and USD$2.5 million in

employee donations (Atlassian 2020).

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MVP AND THE ATLASSIAN SUSTAINABILITY REPORT

Atlassian launched MVP (minimum viable product) its first sustainability

report on April 2019 (Atlassian 2020). The report includes feedback from peers,

sustainability professionals, investors, and employees and progress-trackers.

Following the success of MVP, Atlassian and its team created MVP 2.0 also

known as ‘The Atlassian Sustainability Report’ covering the progress of Atlassian

from July 2019 to June 2020. The report highlights the practices and objectives

undertaken by the company so, as Atlassian states, “stakeholders feel confident

that we’re actively managing our long-term environmental and social risks,

seizing opportunities, and embedding sustainability into our corporate strategy”

(Atlassian 2020). Moreover, the report tackles the programs undertaken and

goals that were achieved by the company from year 2019-2020. Through the use

of key performance indicators (KPIs) and achievements, Atlassian highlights the

advancement it made over the past year and it how it aims to spread out the

direction of the company for the years to come, and recognize arising issues that

needs fixing (Atlassian 2020). More of these highlights will be tackled in the

succeeding part of this report.

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SUSTAINABILITY
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EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS

1. Expect communication breakdowns and view them as opportunities to

refine your message - When someone misunderstands you, it’s easy to get

frustrated or even angry, but if you’re ready for it, if you’re waiting for that

moment when it all falls apart, you feel excitement and think,

2. Feel responsible and accountable for your communications being

successful - There is a difference between being at fault or to blame and being

responsible and accountable. To use the example from the book The Subtle Art

of Not Giving a F*ck, if someone leaves a baby on your doorstep, you aren’t to

blame for the baby’s abandonment, but you are responsible for your actions once

you find the baby. Fault and blame are in the past while responsibility and

accountability are in the present. When your communications are not understood
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as you intend, for any reason, you should feel responsible for helping your

recipients close that gap.

3. Tailor your message and your medium to your audience - This means

understanding who you’re communicating with, their context, and the potential

noise the message will encounter, and using that knowledge to modify the words

and medium you choose to account for that. A little empathy for your colleagues

can go a long way.

4. Tell a story - If I walk into a project kickoff meeting, assign tasks to each

person, and then promptly walk out of the meeting, I will leave behind a group of

baffled coworkers. To have a successful project, you need everyone to know the

story of the project: its timeline, how tasks are broken down, which tasks are

dependent on others, who is driving the project, how we’ll communicate

throughout the project, and what the goal of the project is. It’s the same for any

other kind of communication. We are not robots. We are humans and we like to

understand what’s going on. Craft a narrative that includes all of the relevant

details when communicating to help your teammates understand. This could be

as simple as reviewing your agenda at the start of a meeting or as involved as a

30-minute keynote presentation outlining your 3-year product strategy.

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EXAMPLES OF INNOVATION AND LATERAL THINKING SKILLS

“Our unique values describe, at the most

fundamental level, what we stand for. These five
values shape our culture, influence who we are,
what we do, and even who we hire. They're hard-
wired into our DNA and will stay the same as we
continue to grow.”
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LEADERSHIP

How to help your team

develop a growth mindset?

Teams with growth mindsets

worry less about looking

smart and more about

learning.

1. Start slow - Some teams operate successfully within a fixed mindset,

especially those with predictable duties and workflows. If that’s true for your

team, it might not be appropriate to call for a complete overhaul of your ways of

working – but you can start with some small things to cultivate a growth mindset.

One easy place to start is with information sharing. Even with fixed duties or

workflows, providing information to everyone on the team and company about

how your work gets done will only increase your ability to grow and improve.

2. Measure outcomes, not hours - Growth-minded individuals like being judged

on outcomes, not vanity metrics like work hours. There’s even a term for this:

trust-based working.
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Dr. Michael Ilgner, Global Head of Human Resources at Deutsche Bank,

explained it this way in an interview with the World Economic Forum: “The old

way is where

you come in, work your time, and leave again. But this way, you hand over the

responsibility to people. You set them a task — ‘By tomorrow, we want to have

that strategy done’ — then leave it up to them how effectively they use their

time.”

3. Default to transparency - Get comfortable with open access to information

that will empower your team to work better. At worst, secrecy kills motivation. At

best, it slows down work as people wait for permission to access files.

Atlassian’s collaboration tool, Confluence, defaults to transparency. Every

document in your team or company’s Confluence space is viewable by other

team members and coworkers, unless you opt to restrict access. Within our own

company, we’ve seen this help teams make faster decisions and work more

efficiently. Of course, you can use permissions settings to make the necessary

documents private, but you won’t have to worry about coworkers not having

access to the information they need.

4. Design for innovation - A growth mindset on your team is one that seeks to

constantly improve, and that’s a good thing for your business because
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companies must continually adapt to stay alive. A fixed mindset would manifest

itself in fear of trying something new because of the potential of failure – but

failure is actually something to be celebrated because it makes us learn.

REFERENCES

Atlassian Corporation Plc. (2015). Atlassian Translations. Retrieved from

https://translations.atlassian.com/.

Atlassian Corporation Plc. (2016, June 30). 2015 annual and transition report.

Retrieved from http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-

0001650372/05cd102d-2716-4247-824ebf80d4693af2.pdf.

Atlassian Corporation Plc. (2017a). Partners. Retrieved from

https://www.atlassian.com/partners/search?page=1.

Atlassian Corporation Plc. (2017b, January 19). Shareholder letter Q2 FY2017.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_news/Q2FY17/Shareholder-Letter-

Q217-final.pdf.

Atlassian Corporation Plc. (2017c, April 27) Shareholder letter Q3 FY2017.

Retrieved from https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_news/Q3/Shareholder-

Letter-Q317.pdf.
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Atlassian Corporation Plc. (n.d.). Company. Retrieved from

https://www.atlassian.com/company.

Forbes (2017, May 1). Scott Farquhar profile. Forbes Magazine. Retrieved from

https://www.forbes.com/profile/scott-farquhar/. 30

Forbes. (2017, May 1). Mike Cannon-Brookes profile. Forbes Magazine.

Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/profile/mike-cannon-brookes/.

S&P Capital IQ. (2017, April 28). Atlassian Corporation Plc. Stock Report.

Retrieved from S&P Capital IQ Net Advantage database.

Carlson, R.M., 2017. Atlassian: Analysis and strategic recommendation.