Jira for business teams (formerly Jira Work Management)

Jira started as a tool for software teams. Jira Work Management, launched in 2021, gave business teams their own version. In 2024 Atlassian folded the two back together, so there is now one Jira for everyone, with different templates and features depending on the kind of work.

If you searched for Jira Work Management, this is what it has become, and how to get the most from it.

Related service: Jira consulting and implementation

What happened to Jira Work Management

• May 2024: Atlassian announced that Jira Software and Jira Work Management would become a single product called Jira.
• Late 2024 to mid 2025: Jira Work Management stopped being sold, and existing customers were migrated automatically from February 2025. Business projects and their data moved across without a data migration. Customers with both products were combined into one subscription.
• 2025: Jira Cloud adopted new terms. Issues became work items, and projects became spaces. APIs and JQL still accept the old words, and Data Center keeps the old terms.

If you were a Jira Work Management customer, there's nothing left to do. Your business spaces now live in Jira.

What business teams get in Jira today

• Templates by team. Atlassian provides space templates for marketing content management, HR recruitment, legal document approval, sales lead tracking, finance workflows, and general project, process and task management.
• Views for non-technical users. A spreadsheet-style list with inline and bulk editing, plus board, calendar, timeline and summary views. Most business users never need to touch a backlog or a sprint.
• Forms. Collect requests, such as a creative brief or a contract review, through a form that creates a work item in the right space.
• Approvals. Since February 2026, approval steps can sit inside a workflow, with single or group approvers and an audit trail. Approvals need the Premium or Enterprise plan.
• Goals. Link work items to company goals, and track progress against them in list and summary views.

Business spaces and software spaces

Both kinds of space live in the same Jira site, so a marketing launch can link directly to the engineering work it depends on. That cross-team view was the main reason for the merge.

Automation, now measured in steps

Jira automation handles the routine work: assigning items, setting due dates, moving work when an approval lands, notifying people in Slack or Teams. Usage is now measured in automation steps, pooled across your organisation and reset monthly:

• Free: 150 steps a month for the whole subscription.
• Standard: 400 steps per user per month.
• Premium: 750 steps per user per month.
• Enterprise: 1,000 steps per user per month.

From 3 December 2026, usage above the allowance is billed. If you rely on high-volume rules, review them before then. Older guides quoting allowances in "rule runs" are out of date.

Rovo AI in Jira

Rovo, Atlassian's AI, is included in paid Jira plans (not Free). For business teams the useful parts are:

• Creating work items from a Confluence page, a Slack thread or an email, and breaking a large piece of work into tasks.
• Summaries of a work item's status, blockers and recent updates, so nobody has to read the whole thread.
• Drafting status updates, and assigning routine work to Rovo agents.
• Searching across Jira, Confluence and connected tools such as Google Drive, SharePoint and Teams.

Rovo usage is measured in credits. Jira Standard includes 25 credits per user per month, Premium 70 and Enterprise 150, pooled across the organisation. Search and summaries don't use credits. As with automation, extra usage is billed from 3 December 2026, so check your organisation's billing settings.

Plans and the Teamwork Collection

• Free: up to 10 users, with limited automation and no Rovo.
• Standard: for most teams, with Rovo and a per-user automation allowance.
• Premium: adds Plans for cross-team planning with capacity and dependencies, approvals, sandboxes, a 99.9% uptime SLA and 24/7 support.
• Enterprise: adds multiple sites, a 99.95% uptime SLA, and single sign-on and user provisioning without a separate Atlassian Guard subscription.

Organisations using Jira and Confluence together can buy the Teamwork Collection, which bundles Jira, Confluence, Loom and Rovo agents, with much larger Rovo credit allowances than Jira alone. Atlassian raised Cloud list prices on 13 October 2026, so check current pricing, or ask us, before budgeting. Our Atlassian licensing guide covers buying in Australia.

Connecting Jira to the rest of the business

Business teams rarely work only in Jira. The marketing launch depends on customer data in the CRM, the onboarding workflow depends on the HR system, and the budget lives in finance. Atlassian provides first-party connections to Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, Confluence and Loom. For most other systems you need an integration:

• CRM: there's no native Atlassian integration with Salesforce or Dynamics 365. Connecting them means a Marketplace app, an integration platform or a custom build, so that, for example, a closed deal creates the onboarding work in Jira automatically.
• HR and identity: new starters and leavers can trigger work in Jira and access changes in your identity platform.
• Finance and ERP: approved purchase requests or project budgets can sync with the finance system rather than being re-keyed.

One technical deadline matters here. Atlassian's older Connect app framework reaches end of support on 31 January 2027, and the Marketplace has accepted only new Forge apps since September 2025. If any of your integrations run on Connect, check the vendor's Forge plans now. Our guide to integrating Atlassian with your tech stack goes deeper.

In practice: one platform for a global launch process

A global manufacturer of premium kitchen appliances was running product launches across global and regional marketing teams on several disconnected tools. We consolidated the launch process into Jira and Confluence, with launch deliverables, tasks and dates set automatically from the launch plan, and Confluence as the source of truth for strategy. More than 50 global teams and 400 tasks now run on one platform. Read the case study.

Getting started

1. Pick one team and one process. A request intake, a campaign workflow or an approval process makes a good first space.
2. Start from a template and change only what you need: work types, a few custom fields, the workflow statuses.
3. Add a form so requests arrive complete.
4. Automate the obvious steps, such as assignment, due dates and notifications, and watch your step usage.
5. Connect one other system that removes re-keying, then expand to the next team.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

List the processes your business teams run in spreadsheets, email and chat today, and the systems each one touches. The one with the most re-keying is usually the best first candidate for Jira. We're happy to help you choose it and connect it.