Case Study: How BMW AG Uses Talk for Atlassian Confluence

October 16, 2018
#Case Study#Collaboration
6 min

BMW Group relies heavily on enterprise-ready, robust and mature software to fulfill highest quality standards. Creating comprehensive technical documentation for our worldwide retailer organisation is a very important part to support all business processes aiming for an extraordinary customer experience.

Adding Talk to our Confluence instance is a giant step forward in achieving a smooth and frictionless review within the authoring process.

Michael Merwald

BMW AG, our customer, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of automobiles and motorcycles (BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce brands). This global company operates 30 production and assembly facilities in 14 countries worldwide. Being one of the oldest carmakers in the industry, BMW AG manufactures sophisticated vehicles and sets trends in production technology.

Integrated Service Process Initiative (ISPI Next) is a multi-department project of BMW AG that unites more than 300 employees. Development of all service deliverables for the worldwide BMW Group retail organisation and third parties, e.g. hardware, software, processes, support, training and documentation is the main objective of this project.

The ISPI Next team uses Atlassian Confluence to create, distribute, upgrade, and review all corresponding technical documentation. The team of the project decided to power up Confluence with the Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app to improve collaboration between authors and reviewers of the content they create.

Collaborative authoring

The authoring community of the project can easily access the comments created with the help of the Talk app while editing and revising their text. All discussions are available both in the view and edit modes that helps the team facilitate their work on the content.

discussion in Confluence in page edit mode

 

The capability to work with comments during collaborative text editing allows them to point out relevant documentation parts among each other to edit or extend those towards a comprehensive body of knowledge.

Ensuring high quality documentation

During creation of their technical documentation, the ISPI Next team relies on peer review to enhance documentation quality upfront. Talk enables them to do so including their specific requirements meeting the BMW Group Quality Goals.

They can prioritize comments to help their colleagues tackle the talks by priority and focus on what matters for the team at the moment.

high priority discussion in Confluence

 

This useful feature helps them improve their review process and structure their work with Confluence content. Now all the team members can quickly look through all the talks to find the ones that require immediate attention.

Reporting

To support the release cycles of ISPI Next, the team uses the Talk Report to manage the scope of review comments and get a detailed report of which improvements found their way into documentation.

The project manager and also teams can easily get an overview of all the comments within a space to clearly identify what is done and what needs action at the moment.

overview of all the comments within a Confluence space

This way the Talk report helps the document responsible people locate the talks without mentions and make sure that the comments assigned to their team members will be resolved as soon as possible.

Challenges and benefits

The Talk – Advanced Inline Comments app makes reviewing technical documentation a breeze for the ISPI Next team of BMW AG. This solution allows them to easily:

  • Add and review comments both while viewing and editing the content;
  • Prioritize discussions to draw their colleagues’ attention to the urgent issues;
  • View all the list of all comments (open and resolved) within a space.

This solution helps the ISPI Next team and other Talk users save time and effort while working on their content in Confluence.