by Bill Cushard (@BillCush)

From the start, Atlassian built its business creating products to help developers ship better software beginning with JIRA. Atlassian later developed Confluence as a means to help software teams document work and communicate better. Used together, JIRA and Confluence became an excellent way for software teams to track issues and document work collaboratively across distributed teams that improved the way the developer teams worked.

It worked so well, that other teams in organizations started discovering ways to use JIRA and Confluence to improve how they tracked work, collaborated with each other, served customers, and increased productivity. On the leading edge of this innovation is Zurich Financial Services Australia, which uses JIRA and Confluence in its Underwriting Services team to provide service to its insurance broker network and manage policy renewals.

Not exactly software development.

In a recent webinar I sat down with Mark Bennett, the Head of Business Intelligence at Zurich Financial Services Australia, to talk about how JIRA and Confluence are used to support and enable the underwriting work processes to consistently improve service levels of the insurance underwriting services team.

You may certainly download a recorded version of that webinar or view the slides, but I would also like to do a brief recap here to give you an idea about how JIRA and Confluence can be used by non-developer teams. After all, JIRA and Confluence are not just for developers anymore.

But first, a brief summary about Zurich. Zurich Financial Services Australia is part of the Zurich Insurance Group. It was started in Sydney, Australia in 1961 and today has general insurance gross written premium of AUD $1.3 billion and more than 1,000 employees. The business is divided into two main segments. First, it offers general insurance solutions to commercial customers. Second, it offers life and investment solutions to commercial and personal customers primarily through financial advisors.

Collaborative Underwriting Process

Zurich Financial Services Australia had an opportunity to free up the time of their state-based underwriters to focus on revenue growth. They wanted to do this by centralizing policy renewal management and other administrative tasks. To do this, they started by creating a hub-and-spoke collaborative service model, which was an important first step, but the team did not have a "fit for purpose" workflow or a single source of operational data to run the collaborative model.

JIRA and Confluence were selected to deliver this requirement. JIRA was selected because it is a collaborative tool, and because it could be configured to support standardized workflows needed by the underwriting team to track policies. Perhaps more importantly, JIRA fields could be customized in the language of the underwriting team, so using the tool was intuitive for the underwriting team. In the webinar, Bennett makes a special point that one key thing that made adoption so high was that they customized JIRA using the language of the business, so people felt comfortable using it.

Confluence was selected because it was used to document how the workflow was defined and how work flowed through JIRA. In other words, they used Confluence to document the new work using JIRA. Bennett stated that without proper documentation in Confluence, the project would not have been possible. The documentation was a key part of how people were on-boarded and trained, but also how people were able to get on-going support.

Results

Results were seen almost immediately. In the webinar, Bennett noted two types of results from the project. First, were qualitative results. Bennett received feedback from the team that "they absolutely love it (JIRA)." People liked using it to communicate with each other, to track policies in the workflow, and how it integrated so nicely with tools they already used, like IBM Notes. On the quantitative side, after JIRA and Confluence were implemented, the team showed consistently improved service levels over several months, as measured by the number of policies processed in 30 day periods.

Key Lessons Learned

Finally, I asked Bennett to describe a fey key lessons he learned from this project. He shared four important lessons that could benefit anyone considering a JIRA and/or Confluence implementation. Here are those key lessons:

Lesson 1: Needs an Owner

Find someone who cares a lot about the solution. Someone who can drive it and get it over inevitable obstacles that will arise.

Lesson 2: Focus on User Adoption

Establish a training program, identify champions, and conduct train-the-trainer sessions with champions. The tools needs to be intuitive (change field names and amend workflows into the language your team knows and in the context of how people are already accustomed to working).

Lesson 3: Need a Dedicated (and the right) JIRA Administrator

Be crystal clear about the role and find someone dedicated to administering JIRA.

Lesson 4: Be Prepared for Reporting

Once people starting seeing how great work is getting done, people will want reports. Be prepared for the burden of reporting.

That is just a brief recap of how Zurich Financial Services Australia uses JIRA and Confluence and some key lessons that can be learned from their experience. I recommend you listen to the webinar to hear about Bennett's story directly. I believe you can gain some great insight into how any type of team can use JIRA and Confluence to improve collaboration and productivity.