Atlassian

It’s time to talk about one of the most useful team management tools out there, Atlassian. Technically, this is a website that covers several tools and a few of them have their own reviews on here, so I can go in-depth into the various shit you can use them for. Trello deserves its own page and all. Yes, that Trello. It belongs to these boys and girls. They’ve made so many useful tools you may have heard of before, like BitBucket. They ball really hard. They’ve got almost as many useful tools as I’ve got notches on my bedpost. They’re going way out of their way to be the best in the business. They also do everything right. None of their shit is half-assed. These are the top dog professionals who excel at management software with low prices and high quality. There’s no way around it.

Now, I’m going to go through all of the tools and also discuss how the damn things are packaged. It can be challenging for an up-and-coming webmaster to figure this shit out, especially since most of their tools have free tiers and you can’t exactly know which tool is the right one for you. They tend to market them to specific niches, but the tools are extensible and adaptable. Also, they come with a bit of overlap and that just makes things more confusing.

The flagship Atlassian software is probably Jira. But, Trello partly replaces Jira. If you’ve got a small team that doesn’t have many daily tasks, Trello will probably cover all of your team management needs. So, Trello makes Jira redundant in that sense. Why would you upscale to a superior software when the free task board does everything for you? Well, I’ll dive into the differences between all of these tools and try to demystify the ways you’re expected to use them. They’re super-specific and their features are really streamlined, so it shouldn’t be that hard to tell them apart.

Staring Simple

Let’s talk about Trello a bit. It’s a simple and free to use task board that lets you pin tasks to a… board. You can tag your employees so that it’s clear who’s in charge of a given task at any time. You’re also free to comment on tasks and update them as they get closer to the finish line. They even give you some small storage so you can upload images that are relevant to the tasks. It’s a simple tool that is often perfect for teams that don’t see a reason to upgrade. I’ve used Trello before and I’ve got to say, it had everything I needed. This was years ago, before all the recent updates and integrations.

Speaking of integrations – all of the tools under the Atlassian umbrella are compatible with each other. They also go out of their way to integrate popular external tools like Google Drive, for example. So, you can use Google Drive with Trello and Trello with Jira. But, what’s the incentive to actually spring for a larger and more complex tool than Trello? Well, it has to do with scale and project complexity. If you’ve got one site with one employee whose job it is to upload smut videos on the daily, you probably don’t even need Trello. You could make do with a fucking Skype chat and an Excel sheet.

But, the second you get another employee, suddenly your responsibilities start to grow. Then, you get another type of task. Now you need to keep tabs on both regular video uploads and content curation. Then, you’ll need someone to do garbage collection. On top of that, you have to reply to customer e-mails. Suddenly, your stack is way too big to keep track of in a Skype chat. That’s when Trello comes in. You keep at it for a month or two and by the time you start your second site, you begin to realize that Trello is way too simple to handle a small empire’s worth of tasks. It’s just not extensive enough. That’s where Jira comes in.

Jira to the Rescue

If you can imagine a team management tool, Jira has it. This is more than a tool; it’s a fucking platform. It has more menus, options and data dumps than a text-based porn game. Here’s why that’s a good thing – you don’t actually have to use them all. They’ve figured out a very intuitive behind the scenes data structure that tracks all of your projects in a way that is both easy to use and easy to understand. You create a project, you list the tasks that need to be done and you make templates for future tasks, so you don’t lose your mind while you enter all of this data manually.

On top of that, Jira was planned with team collaboration in mind. So, whether you’re working with seasoned employees or you’ve just hired a freelancer on Upwork, you can hand them a Jira account and send them on their way. I’d even go as far as to hire a Jira management expert on retainer to ensure that everyone’s making maximal use of the features. Alternatively, you could just dump your whole team on Jira and have them figure it out themselves. The hardest part of being a manager who uses team management software is getting your team to actually use the damn thing properly. Freelancers often prefer to just do their work and submit it. The whole reporting and debrief process is rarely their strong suit. So, you have to give them a little nudge in the right direction.

Maybe you could develop a standard workflow, to really paint them a picture here. Like, say, they have two dedicated times a week when they have to input their progress in a specific part of the Jira dashboard so you can keep track of their progress. But, what if their work is way too complex to put into words? What if they’re doing coding and integration work for your affiliate marketing setups and there’s no way to sum up their progress in a short summary? Well, that’s where the advanced Jira variants come in.

Jira for Coders and Web Developers

There’s a ridiculous amount of integration-ready out of the box if you’ve got a team of developers working on your porn sites. Imagine a scenario where you’ve got a hundred affiliate deals ready to go and they’ve all sent you the embed and signup information. You are not going to be spending your time embedding every single one of these bad boys yourself, especially not if you have some sort of dynamic affiliate campaign management integration in mind. Like, if you want to hot-swap different campaigns for performance. You’ll want your developers to handle all of this for you.

So, do you just give them the logins and send them on their way? No, fuck that. You put that shit inside Jira and have the software list them out as projects. Then, you put your website on Jira. That’s right. You can integrate your entire website codebase into the fucking platform using BitBucket. Then, your developers log into Jira and code straight onto this repository and you track their progress, without them having to file any reports. You can see everything they’re doing, even though they’re not going out of their way to tell you about it. They don’t have to hear from you, you don’t have to hear from them and yet the work gets done.

The Features Never End

There are so many fucking features under the Jira umbrella; it blows my mind. They even have an entire section of the site devoted to talking about service delivery. They have this neat holistic feature that allows service providers advanced insight and management into their delivery process. Technically, this is a dev-ops tool, but a porn website that has a two-way relationship with viewers does actually fall under the service delivery umbrella, especially if you’re charging your viewers for the smut you peddle.

There’s also Jira Align, which is a large scale team management platform in the literal sense. It manages team composition. This is basically an army simulator. You make units, formations, legions, divisions and the like, but they use nerdier terms to describe them. I doubt you’ll need Align unless you’re straight-up running a porn enterprise.

The standard Jira core experience is actually free, for life, for 10 users per team. You get unlimited spaces and pages. It’s amazing. You do miss out on analytics and some neat features like anonymous access, but for the most part, it’s a great way to try Jira. Moving up, there are $500 and $1000 tiers, charged yearly, per user. The difference between the free and the paid versions is massive, so you have to go through the specific features yourself to decide whether or not you need to upgrade. I strongly urge you to check their pricing page carefully. Don’t buy something you don’t need.