Atlas is a teamwork directory that connects the dots across teams, their apps, and work — wherever it happens. You can easily see what work has happened and how it is going now. The purpose of Atlas is to bring openness, context, and connectedness to work across teams.

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A project represents any piece of work that people on your team or stakeholders at your company would like to receive regular weekly updates about to stay in the loop.

Atlas projects help bring work into one place and provide just the right amount of context so that anyone at your company can understand what is being worked on, why it is happening, who is responsible for it, and how it is going. Below are some practical guidelines and tips for setting up a project.

A goal represents the outcomes that multiple projects or streams of work contribute to. Goals take a longer time to achieve and can be represented by various frameworks, such as OKRs, KPIs, SMART goals, and more.

You can set your bar higher or lower. The most important thing is to set a threshold low enough that your team will always have visibility into any piece of work that could block, impact, or have a dependency on the work of other teams.

If you created the project you will be the default project owner. For Atlas to work properly the project owner is a very important role because they are ultimately in charge of keeping the project up to date.

The project owner is responsible for:

We will discuss the concepts contributors, update, status, and target date below.

If for some reason you roll off the project or things change and someone else will be owning that project feel free to add them as the project owner. You can make this change at any time.

To create a project click the blue Create button in the top nav.

When you create a project you will be asked to do two things:

Every Atlas project needs an About section so teammates can quickly get context about the work. You need to write the following:

At Atlassian, we shoot for 3-5 sentence descriptions for each question. In this section try to be succinct. Give people the cliff notes version. You can always include links to other pages, dashboards, epics, and more for folks who want to dive deeper into the details.

Atlas can’t work without your team! When you create a project add the people you are working directly with as contributors in the section below the project owner in the right panel.

All Contributors will receive updates about the project status every Monday. They also have more control over the project and can edit or update aspects of a project. They can write the Friday update, change the status, and move the target date if necessary, which is helpful if the owner is on PTO.

You can share your project with anyone at your company. This gives them the opportunity to become a follower of your project and receive weekly updates.

Adding followers to your project is a great way to keep stakeholders and people outside of the working team in the loop. Adding followers reduces the number of people pinging you about how things are going, you might even get to cancel a status meeting, or at least use that time for more meaningful conversations.

Who should be a follower? We recommend inviting your manager, peers in your org, and key cross-functional partners to follow your project. These are all folks who will inevitably want to know how things are going, and now they will be updated automatically.

A project owner will get notified by email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams on Friday morning to write an update. You can also write your update earlier in the week by going directly to your project’s page and clicking the updates tab.

Goal updates are monthly, not weekly.

Updates in Atlas are constrained to 280 characters. They are meant to be concise, easily digestible by any stakeholder, and to the point. They happen every week, so there is no reason to write an essay to summarise this point in time.

Here are some tips:

Also, all updates are stored in Atlas so you can go back in time to see what happened and any decisions that were made.

What do the status settings mean in Atlas? Here are some suggested definitions of status. These are only a starting point please feel free to customize them for your organization.

Status and dates are both controlled manually. Any change will be reflected in the project timeline. If you do change the project’s status or date you should state why in the weekly update.

Updates are automatically sent to contributors and followers each week and are delivered on Monday morning.

Your teammates are notified and can consume updates through several different channels based on their preference (via email, Slack, and MS Teams).

Yes, they need to show they are engaged. We recommend that every contributor and follower of a project react via an emoji to every update on a project they follow to show they are paying attention.

Even better, you should comment on updates! A comment could be as simple as telling the project owner that they are doing a great job or asking for clarification if you have a question about the update.

You can create goals depending on the planning cadence in your organization. Some companies plan by year, others by quarter. Depending on the organization’s size, there can be team, department, and company-wide goals.

Goals can have sub-goals - as many as needed. Functionally these are the same as Goals - they just stack when you're looking at the Goals page. To add a sub-goal, simply choose the + button on the right panel on any goal page.

You can also create goals depending on the framework you use. For example, the OKR framework (Objectives and Key Results) is one of the most common goal frameworks.

A goal has one owner, and teams are linked to goals based on the projects that contribute to them. Goals are updated on a monthly basis by the owner.

If you created the goal you will be the default goal owner. Goals in Atlas do not have single contributors because they are bigger than projects. Instead, goal owners can add Teams to goals to show who is delivering work that is driving the outcomes.

The goal owner is responsible for:

To create a goal click the blue Create button in the top nav.

When you create a goal you will be asked to name your goal. Decide on the descriptor for your goal, and include the level of your goal - e.g. O / KR, etc. and add tag line.

Every Atlas goal needs an About section so teammates can understand why it’s important and how it helps drive outcomes for the business. We suggest including the following:

For simple setups, one project could map to one goal - but as a company grows, there can be projects mapping to team, department, and company-wide goals.

You can view the projects that map to a goal from the Goal page in Atlas, to quickly understand their latest status.

To connect a project to a goal, go to the project’s homepage and choose + next to Contributes to goals. Search for a goal to connect, or add a new one.

Goal updates are similar to projects, but the main difference is that goal updates are monthly, not weekly.

Goal scoring is a paid Atlas feature and typically works best for those using the OKR framework to set and track their goals.

OKRs are scored on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale and allow companies to measure performance towards top priorities.

Setting challenging and achievable goals is key to the success of OKRs. While easy goals are uninspiring, setting overly ambitious goals creates low motivation. It's important to find a balance and to review and refresh goals on a quarterly basis.

Want to learn more about how to use OKRs in your organization? Check out this helpful guide from Nicole Tang.