Project and Team Management Tools for Academic Research With a Focus on Jira and Confluence

Description:

This mini-course aims to demonstrate the use of project and team management tools in an academic research setting. We will focus (exclusively) on two of the most popular project and knowledge management tools, Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence respectively. Jira is a powerful workflow-based tool for project and task management while Confluence is a knowledge management tool, frequently used as an internal wiki and project documentation tool.

In this Mini Course, we will first introduce the basic concepts of Jira and Confluence, and subsequently demonstrate a sample academic project that makes effective use of these tools. Some of the topics we will explore include:

Creating and customizing a new Jira project
Managing a project’s tasks and timelines
Creating dashboards for progress management
Tracking deliverables (e.g. publications)
Creating a Wiki for research and administrative operations (here, with Confluence)
General recommendations for use of task-management and documentation tools

Instructor:

The instructor for this course will be Dr. Kosmas Deligkaris (Biological Physics Theory). Kosmas is an Atlassian Certified Professional in Managing Jira Cloud Projects and has been involved with Jira and Confluence applications since his early PhD days. Kosmas has published a short article on the use of Wikis in academic research settings in InformationMatters. If you are interested, you can read the article here.

Target audience and learning outcomes:

The course would be useful to those who are:

Interested in Jira and Confluence, or more generally in project management and documentation tools.
Looking to get inspiration on how to use a project/team management tool in their own work.
Keen on understanding how Wikis can support academic research and administrative functions.

After the end of this mini-course participants will be able to:

Evaluate possible benefits of using project, team, and knowledge management software in their own work.
Use Jira in order to manage tasks, deliverables, and reports.
Use Confluence in order to create a single “source of truth” for their projects and team operations.

Schedule & Venue:

May 25, 2023 from 13:00-15:00 in C700

13:00 - 13:45: Jira (Seminar)

13:55 - 14:30: Wikis/Confluence (Seminar)

14:30 - 15:00: Optional practice time. Participants can try out the software on their own, with the instructor being present to answer any questions that may arise. Please bring your own laptop and get an account with Atlassian if you would like to practice (Computer and Atlassian account are not required for the Seminar portion of this session).