Custom Atlassian Solution
Jira & Confluence at Delta Dental
- Client
- Delta Dental
- Industry
- Healthcare / Dental Insurance
- Service
- Jira Customization & Workflow Design | Confluence Implementation | Legacy Migration (Rally → Jira) | Agile Coaching & Knowledge Transfer
Overview
Sphere Partners collaborated with Delta Dental on the first phase of their digital transformation — migrating from a legacy bug-tracking system, Rally (CA Technologies), to Atlassian’s Jira through a customized Confluence solution.
Since 2014, Delta Dental had been facing a significant digital transformation. The company’s growth required expansion of their software development and IT teams, a sophisticated tool for managing development projects and initiatives, and a top-level collaboration platform for document management. In phase two, senior management asked for additional consulting and training on Agile development.
Discovery — Pain Points
Document Management
Printed documents and scattered repositories slowed every collaboration loop and made it impossible to keep a single source of project truth.
Project Management
No end-to-end visibility across teams meant Project Managers fought blockers manually, and progress reporting was rebuilt every cycle.
Product Management
Requests, requirements, and the work that delivered them lived in different tools, breaking traceability between business stakeholders and engineering.
How We Solved It
After identifying Delta Dental’s pain points within their current Jira/Confluence configuration and workflows, Sphere Partners offered a solution that leveraged robust project planning and tracking. Customized conditions, validators, and post-functions in Jira reflected the desired workflows accurately, while Confluence integration provided the connection between business stakeholders’ requests and the development activity in Jira.
1. Story / Bug Workflow
Helped Delta Dental’s Business Analysts track and plan all development work across multiple workstreams — bringing engineering and BA teams onto a single shared cadence.
2. General Project-Management Workflow
Defined Project Management milestones such as Action Items and Risks, with capabilities for mitigating project blockers — turning reactive PM into proactive PM.
3. Hotfix Workflow
A dedicated workflow for tracking critical bug fixes across different business units. A unified hotfix process gave Delta Dental accurate reporting and the ability to manage bottlenecks across teams.
4. Confluence as the Source of Project Truth
Sphere implemented custom Confluence templates for Initiation, Planning, Execution, and Control phases — filling the gap between business stakeholders and software project managers, and replacing printed documents with a true digital collaboration platform.
Configuration Depth
Jira customization spanned issue types and schemes, workflow schemes, screen schemes, custom fields, issue security, permissions, notifications, Kanban and Scrum boards, dashboards, add-ons, global permissions, project roles, backup policies, indexing and logging, mail settings, and LDAP user management. Confluence work covered global configuration, templates and blueprints, permissions, LDAP, and macros — a foundation tuned for the way Delta Dental actually works.
Key Outcomes
Portfolio Management View
C-level Confluence spaces with business templates and interlinks with Jira projects gave Delta Dental a portfolio management view across different business areas.
Migration with Legacy Data Intact
All Jira and Confluence enhancements were implemented successfully with legacy data preserved, so historical context wasn’t lost in the move.
Visibility for QA & UAT
Workflow changes gave QA and UAT teams visibility into the staging environment and increased transparency across each development phase.
Empowered Users at Every Level
Personalized training sessions and a sophisticated knowledge base empowered every Delta Dental user — from software engineers to salespeople — with Jira and Confluence best practices.
The Results
Sphere Partners created a proof of concept for Delta Dental’s business cycle, with C-level Confluence spaces, business templates, internal integrations, and interlinks with Jira projects — providing a portfolio management view across different business areas.
After thorough planning, the new application settings came together seamlessly. Delta Dental leveraged Sphere’s recommendations and saw instant improvements to development and IT processes — plus the flexibility to manage dozens of large Jira projects without losing legacy data. Knowledge transfer (training demos, personalized sessions, and a knowledge base) made the new platform stick across teams.
