Avalara champions collaboration, communication, and inclusion with Atlassian

Time to wake up from the “folder nightmare”

Many companies talk about improving communication and collaboration, but Avalara is showing how to turn abstract goals into concrete results with the help of Atlassian. 

The teams behind Avalara’s tax compliance software had been working with a variety of tools for product development and management, while storing documents on a central drive that Lead Program Manager Shannon Dinesen calls a “folder nightmare.” It was difficult to collaborate across projects and teams – and even harder to find files and up-to-date information. Siloes also created communication challenges, including getting buy-in at the top level, distilling critical information down to all teams, and staying aligned from planning through delivery. 

Transforming ideas into impact through consolidation and collaboration

Since centralizing from multiple tools to one Atlassian platform, Avalara’s teams have been able to create a central source of truth, collaborate more, work faster, adopt agile methods, and better track their work at all levels. 

For example, before Atlassian, engineers used to create one ticket in Trac and one ticket in Quickbase, then link them together – a tedious and time-consuming process. Now, teams across the organization create one ticket in Jira Software, augment it with links to more information in other Atlassian tools, then work together to execute the task or resolve the issue. Employees and managers can also reference Plans in Jira Software for an executive view of their work at a global and project level.  

“Atlassian tools support our software development life cycle. They not only help us communicate project status in general, but also specifically where projects are blocked and why,” Shannon says. “Atlassian keeps us aligned and helps us collaborate on the streams of work that need to happen from many different business units to roll out a feature or a new application.” 

Automation saves time while scaling impact

In addition to gaining more visibility over their work streams with the help of Jira Software, Avalara is also using native automations to accelerate many processes, such as populating views in Plans; managing system access for security; assigning epics and stories to over 10,000 tickets; and supporting special initiatives.

For instance, Avalara launched the Inclusive Language Project to remove potentially offensive language from their internal documentation. Using a custom Python script and automation in Jira Software, the team has already updated over 600 tickets and 225 Confluence pages. This is just one of the ways Avalara is using their Atlassian platform to live their values and show how to work smart and with heart.

With greater trackability, flexibility, collaboration, communication, and inclusion, Avalara is strengthening their products from the inside out with the support of Atlassian.