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Contents
About TM Forum
Scoping and Successful Adoption
Choosing Confluence
Project Overview
About Clearvision Further Reading/Resources
The Collaboration Challenge
Collaboration and the Future of Teamwork
Collaboration and Innovation at Scale
About Atlassian
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About TM Forum02
Providing a platform for hundreds of global members across a wide range of industries, TM Forum enables members to collaborate and team up, to co-create, deliver, and monetize innovative digital services for their billions of customers.
The TM Forum vision is to drive the next wave of digital business growth – the digitalization of every industry – by providing a common innovation platform to connect businesses, industries, and ecosystems.
TM Forum’s focus is on getting numerous organizations across industries and ecosystems to work together and agree on common means of transformation into successful digital businesses.
As well as accelerating innovation and providing the blueprint for digital success, TM Forum understands the value of connecting the right people.
The collaborative work that the Forum and its members are doing has a profound impact on members, the marketplace, and even society as a whole.
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“TM Forum is the global member association for digital business.”
By members, for members
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About TM Forum cont.
TM Forum and Collaboration
“TM Forum’s collaboration focuses on delivering rapid pragmatic solutions to the top technology challenges that our members face, driven and validated by the business needs of key industry influencers. Working and playing a leadership role provides the opportunity to shape and influence these far reaching industry best practices and standards.
“We do this through highly structured agile collaborative techniques, such as agile workshops, hacks, online collaborative working sessions, continuous validation and practical demonstrations of solutions at industry events.
“When hundreds of global members across a wide range of industries collaborate and partner to co-create, prototype, deliver, and monetize innovative digital services, rapid and pragmatic solutions are created.
“Collaboration offers our members a number of benefits including :
• Accelerated R&D and reduced costs
• Build network and partnering opportunities
• Provide a channel to market
“Confluence is being used by our global membership as the platform for collaboration for the co-creation, editing and publishing of our industry best practices and standards.”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
“
The Collaboration Challenge04
As an organization with collaboration at the centre of its ethos, TM Forum was looking to adopt a tool that would maximie this.
TM Forum’s goal was to provide a place for its member organizations to come together to solve problems; “going it alone” in a global, digitalized market is ineffective.
• Standardization of best practices• Leveraging of new technological opportunities • Frameworks for end-to-end management
To achieve this, collaboration between TM Forum members is of vital importance. TM Forum’s aim is to create a level playing field among members (including some competing organizations) by providing them a “table” to work around. The members themselves then drive collaboration and solve problems.
This is where Confluence was the answer. Before adopting Confluence, TM Forum had been experiencing several challenges around collaboration.
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“Member collaboration is at the heart of the Forum and represents the value creation engine that thousands of professionals in hundreds of member companies use around the globe.”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
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The Collaboration Challenge cont.
It’s a problem many organizations face when working with the likes of Word files and PDFs. In order for project team members to collaborate on documents, they would need to work offline and then upload the new versions. Meanwhile, others might comment inline in the documents and upload those new versions.
There was a separation of where the work was done and where the results were published. This disconnect could lead to a lack of clarity.
Publishing documents at the end of a cycle to the TM Forum website was a complex affair. The process involved multiple steps, none of which added any real value.
It wasn’t a particularly smooth way of working, and it meant that visibility was poor to the wider audience.
TM Forum needed software to allow for streamlined processes, centralization and, most importantly, real-time collaboration.
Assets were predominantly document based
Work took place in multiple locations
Publishing was complex
Choosing Confluence06
Settling on Confluence was, in itself, a collaborative act for TM Forum.
As a member organization, the teams at TM Forum felt that it was vital for members to be involved in making the decision on what tools they’d like to use. There was an extensive consultation program that engaged members, asking for suggestions of what features and tools they thought would make collaboration as effortless as possible.
Confluence is as highly regarded for its flexibility as it is for enabling collaboration. These were two primary factors in TM Forum’s decision.
“ TM Forum was able to anticipate some of the challenges the adoption of a new tool could cause, and solve them before they caused major interruptions to the flow of work.”
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Why Confluence?
• As a web platform, it’s accessible for our members without requiring anything other than standard web browsers
• It can scale to meet our needs
• It removes barriers that have been preventing frictionless collaboration
• It vastly improves visibility of work in progress• It has greatly simplified the publishing process
• Published “documents” are now web pages that
the wider membership can interact with online
• Confluence has the flexibility of access security needed to support our IPR policy
• The Atlassian ecosystem features hundreds of add-ons and extensions that allow improvements and features to be added without the need for customization
• Confluence also gives us the ability to build our own customizations when there is a specific need
TM Forum says:
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
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Choosing Confluence cont.
The Atlassian Marketplace is where you can discover and try add-ons to extend your Atlassian products, including Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket, and HipChat. Add-ons are made by Atlassian, third party vendors, and users of the Atlassian tools - anyone can build an add-on.
Atlassian Marketplace:
At a Glance: TM Forum Confluence
• 10,000 users• 1,000 power users• 12-month timeline• Integrated with WordPress, Telligent community (soon to be
replaced with Higher Logic Community platform), custom-built project approval workflow
• Single sign-on using Crowd• End-to-end primary platform for member collaborative projects
TM Forum uses Confluence for everything from project charter management, the creation and editing of best practices and standards, management of member contributions (via JIRA), and as the tool used for publishing to the TM Forum website.
Explore the Marketplace >
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Collaboration and Innovation at Scale
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In the majority of cases, a Confluence instance operates within a single company. It acts as a collaborative wiki and knowledge base, and when integrated with tools like JIRA Service Desk, it often includes public-facing pages that external users are able to search.
As a members organization, TM Forum is using Confluence in an especially innovative way. Confluence is a platform where all members of TM Forum can collaborate. This means hundreds of organizations require access - one of the reasons having a web-based platform that required no proprietary software or licensing was so key. TM Forum wanted its collaboration platform to be customer-driven.
Deep Dives
Let’s take a closer look at the unique and innovative ways TM Forum is using Confluence to facilitate collaboration between members.
TM Forum has integrated a custom approval workflow that sits in front of Confluence. This ensures the correct members have the correct permissions - an important area of governance for an organization with so many members.
Approval workflows
“To be successful in a global market you have to be able to partner with big and small organizations. You cannot develop alone.”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
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Collaboration and Innovation at Scale cont.
TM Forum has further extended the functionality of Confluence with its custom-built publishing workflow. This is at the heart of the work TM Forum does with its members: TM Forum members work together to produce best practice, digital business models, architectures, APIs, metrics, maturity models and standards that provide the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations.
Publising workflows
When it comes to its members, TM Forum has also introduced a novel way of reporting on the attendees of meetings. By integrating reporting software with the meeting notes template native to Confluence, TM Forum is able for the first time to automatically capture who attends which project meeting.
This visibility is a vital part of the Forum’s data-driven business strategy.
Step 2: Member company’s designated contact grants permission to a space
Step 3: The appropriate permissions are granted via an API call to Atlassian Crowd
Step 4: Access to project space to contribute, feedback, and collaborate
Step 1: Request to join a project via TM Forum’s website
This was often previously done in Word, with only one person
ever able to edit at a time. With Confluence, members can
capture specifications online, in real time - and Confluence’s
new inline commenting brings context to collaboration.
Work is published in Confluence, available to members of
that project only, and can then be exported as a PDF for
those who prefer to download documents.
A key stage in any collaborative process, the rest of the
project team will review the current version of the page.
After any feedback and changes, it will move to the “team
approved” stage of the workflow.
This is a final review process before the content is made
available to the wider TM Forum membership.
After the content has been checked by TM Forum staff,
it is moved into the “Published Deliverables” area of
Confluence. This is accessible to all TM Forum members.
When a page is moved into the Published Deliverables
space, it is automatically pushed to the TM Forum website
(running on the WordPress platform), where it can be
viewed online (taking the user to the Confluence space)
or downloaded.
Each published page features a feedback button. This
is integrated with TM Forum’s JIRA instance, where a
relevant ticket will be created to incorporate approved
feedback in the next iteration of work.
TM Forum’s Confluence also includes a discussion space
for elevated levels of collaboration between members.
With thousands of plugins available for Confluence, TM
Forum was able to implement a discussion area for the
community to come together to help, support, and learn.
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1. Capture specifications
2. Ready for team to review / team approval
3. Checked over by staff
4. “Published deliverables” and
TM Forum site
5. Feedback
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Collaboration and Innovation at Scale cont.
Published on Confluence:
Delivered on website:
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Collaboration and Innovation at Scale cont.
TM Forum is using JIRA Software internally. Confluence and JIRA are integrated, with JIRA being used for formal contributions and feedback and, moving forward, TM Forum intends to extend its use of JIRA to help manage collaboration with even higher levels of visibility.
Scoping and Successful Adoption12
TM Forum began its adoption of Confluence with a pilot on one collaboration project. Those involved in the project were keen to adopt Confluence and see how it could be used.
By using a pilot project, TM Forum gained valuable insight about the best practices on how documents could be adapted to the Confluence format - a major step towards solving one of the company’s key collaboration challenges.
“Confluence is intuitive. We’ve been able to set up simple navigation and have seen a focus on results, rather than users trying to get to grips with the tools.”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
Confluence, JIRA, and looking forward
Step 1
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TM Forum took an innovative approach to rolling out Confluence to the rest of the teams.
Confluence was rolled out to TM Forum’s project teams at Action Week, one of its face-to-face collaboration events. This highlighted the collaboration-first nature of Confluence, and meant that after the pilot team, TM Forum’s project teams were all adopting this new technology together. It provided a collaborative approach to a collaborative tool.
Step 2
Because of the pilot project, TM Forum was able to anticipate some of the challenges the adoption of a new tool could cause, and solve them before they caused major interruptions to the flow of work.
There was initially some confusion about where people should be working and what format teams should be creating documents in.
• To combat this, TM Forum developed some best practices and templates, providing teams with online help, videos, playbooks, and more to clear up confusion and point them in the right direction.
Many teams had existing Word documents as part of their latest project cycle.
• To solve this, TM Forum helped convert existing Word and PDF documents into Confluence native format. This provided a “baseline” in Confluence for project teams to then adopt and iterate on.
Consolidating TM Forum’s previous collaboration environments into one platform now allows Confluence to be the primary collaboration platform for all project teams.
Tackling adoption challenges
Scoping and Successful Adoption cont.
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Collaboration and the Future of Teamwork
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The future of teamwork and success lies in collaboration.
This is why choosing the right software is so essential. TM Forum’s collaborative approach led the organization to choose Confluence, and since rolling out Confluence across project teams, they’ve seen a distinct improvement. Working to solve the challenges and pain points around team collaboration is key to future-proofing teams.
Learn more with the ultimate resource for solving collaboration pain points and future-proofing your teams.
• Collaboration tips from the experts - content from Clearvision, Brikit, Sonatype, Tempo and Zephyr
• Covering testing, DevOps, agile methodologies, employee culture and more
• Tools and trends fresh from The Future of Team Collaboration event
DOWNLOAD | cvcm.me/future-collab
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Project Overview15
• TM Forum needed a solution that would enable teams to collaborate, that would bring visibility and agility to processes
• TM Forum made the decision-making process collaborative, sourcing opinions from those people who would be using the new platform
• Confluence emerged as the clear winner
• TM Forum encouraged adoption by first operating a pilot project, and implementing best practice workflows influenced by the results
• Confluence is being used innovatively to facilitate collaboration for TM Forum’s member organizations, not just within one business
• Confluence has allowed TM Forum to create custom publishing and approval workflows with JIRA integration
“Confluence emerged as the clear leader. It’s the bedrock of our collaboration programs.”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
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About Atlassian16
Atlassian provides teams with the tools they need to get work done together, building software aligned with its company values: agile, open teamwork.
“From medicine and space travel to disaster response robots, our products help teams all over the planet advance humanity through the power of software.”
- Atlassian
Software Development
Plan, track, and release better software faster with the
#1 software development tool used by and designed for
agile teams.
Search, monitor, and track across SVN, Git, and Perforce
repositories for visualization and reporting.
Boost your release pipeline with continuous integration,
deployment, and delivery for professional teams.
Unlock the capabilities of Git and Hg without the
command line with this free desktop client for Git and
Mercurial.
The Git solution for professional teams - collaborate,
manage, share and review code with inline comments
and pull requests.
Collaborative code review - discuss changes, share
knowledge, and identify defects to make compliance
simple.
Integrate Clover with your IDE or continuous integration
system to analyze, optimize, build and see results.
Single sign-on for the enterprise - centralize your
identity management and manage users from multiple
directories.
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About Atlassian cont.
Team Collaboration
Service Desk
Enterprise
Atlassian Data Center TAM
Conquer collaboration, boost teamwork, and discuss and
develop ideas in a simple and structured way.
The most collaborative service management solution on
the market for IT and customer service teams.
Enterprise deployment options for JIRA Software, JIRA
Service Desk, Bitbucket and Confluence. Designed for
consistent performance and availability at scale, ensure
your tools are ready to grow alongside your business.
Process meet project management - simplify and
centralize with JIRA, designed specifically for business
teams.
Team chat for the enterprise - group and private chat, file
sharing, and ChatOps integrations.
Status and incident communication - keep customers
and employees up to date and your team focused on the
problem at hand.
Atlassian’s Technical Account Management services offer
businesses proactive analysis of their software setup
as well as standard support. Optimize your teams with
tailored best practice advice.
The latest addition to the Atlassian product family, Trello
is a flexible project management system for teams.
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About Clearvision18
Clearvision is an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, servicing enterprises globally. Our mission is to empower teams to reach their full potential with Atlassian, Git, and agile transformations.
Clearvision specializes in complex, enterprise-scale implementations of the Atlassian tools, from licensing, configuration and consultancy advice through to training, hosting, and support.
“I wanted to thank the Clearvision team for their support before during and after the Confluence, JIRA and Crowd upgrade this past weekend. It went extremely smoothly, and the feedback from our users has been roundly positive. As you know, this is a mission critical platform for us, so smooth running is essential.
Please pass my thanks to the extended Clearvision team for their help and support. We’re looking forward to the next upgrade, which I’m sure will be even better!”
- Richard May | VP, Technology & Community, TM Forum
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Further Reading/Resources19
The Future of Team Collaboration eBook
Collaboration Tools and Trends
Performance at Scale
Challenges in Collaboration: The enterprise guide to the future of teamwork
TM Forum on Collaboration
Action Week
