IT Service Management (ITSM) refers to the processes that enable businesses to design, build, deliver and support IT services. As businesses have become more technology dependent, ITSM has been crucial to supporting teams and enabling them to continue to deliver value — especially recently with more employees working from home than ever before.
The goal of ITSM is to align IT services and processes with business goals, ensuring effective task management and collaboration.
Jira Service Management (JSM) is an ITSM tool provided by Atlassian for just this purpose. ITSM is complex because it involves cross-team collaboration, along with prioritizing and fulfilling requests, dealing with incidents and system outages, tracking assets (such as laptops and cellphones), and many other activities. JSM is integrated with the Atlassian product suite so that each of these practices can be managed in one place.
This article highlights five reasons why ITSM teams should use JSM.
- Automation
- Real-Time Collaboration
- Sophisticated Service Management
- Ease of use
- Cost
1. Automation
Jira Service Management comes with an automation suite to help automate recurring tasks. This automation means that less precious time is spent on workflow management, enabling teams to focus on their actual work.
Automation can be used to assign tasks to specific agents upon creation. Often, end users who create tasks don’t know which service agent they should be assigning the work to. Without automation, the service team must come up with a process for assigning work. A common approach is to assign work to the agent with the least amount of outstanding work or tasks assigned to them. With JSM you can automate this. A new ticket is automatically assigned to the agent with the most bandwidth.
Automation can also be used to manage the ticket lifecycle. Having a clean ticket board is key to knowing what work is truly outstanding and needs tackling. Tickets can often go stale — especially if they haven’t been closed off as complete, or the end user has stopped responding. Automation can be used to automatically close issues after a specific amount of time and send an automated message to the end user. This prevents the ticket backlog from being filled with stale tickets and automatically notifies the end user to raise a new request if their issue still needs resolving.
2. Real-Time Collaboration
JSM encapsulates everything into a single platform for all teams. This allows for real-time collaboration in several ways. First, end users can watch a ticket transition through states. As well, agents can request further information from users directly on the ticket, keeping all the information in the same place. Live comment discussions are more efficient and organized than email.
Furthermore, because JSM links in with the rest of the Atlassian suite, real-time collaboration in tools like Confluence is simple too — and everything is accessible from the same account. This means agents can work on documentation together, with everyone’s changes applying in real time, which is especially useful when used to document and update processes and work routines as they evolve.
3. Sophisticated Service Management
JSM provides a sophisticated service management approach that helps resolve problems quickly and reliably. It includes several service management tools, such as service request management, change request management, and problem management.
Service request management
Service request management allows businesses to set up a service desk with forms so users can submit their own requests through a central Help Center with Service Portals, whilst supporting requests from email and chat. These can all be aligned through a request queue and assigned via automation.
JSM is very well suited for 1st line and 2nd line support issues. For instance, when an agent needs support from a developer to fix a bug, this is easily done since JSM integrates with Jira Software. This means that Service desk agents can escalate a ticket to 3rd line support where we see many organizations have their software developers.
Change request management
Change request management brings development and operations teams together by providing a seamless process to track, approve, and deploy changes. Developers can make code changes as normal and add JSM change management into their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. This can then trigger a request for approval from another team member before the change is deployed. The change request then serves as a single source of truth for each change, including the initial Jira ticket, the CI/CD pipeline, code commits, Confluence documentation, and relevant team members.
Problem management
Finally, problem management allows agents to trigger an investigation into a specific problem. Agents can create a problem record that links related incidents and documentation in one place. This becomes the single place for team members to diagnose problems. For example, agents could look at recent deployments via JSM and link the deployment to the problem record. Once the problem is documented and diagnosed, the agent creates a change request so the development team can work on a fix.
4. Ease of Use
JSM is easy to set up and includes templates for other departments, such as legal and facility. These templates make it easy to get up and running for any department and provide a portal for end users or other team members to interact with the team. The portal can also be branded to match the business, which is useful if you expose it to end users.
Users or agents can then use the portal to create a service request ticket for a specific team or to find answers to common questions themselves. By setting up a Knowledge Database in Confluence with Knowledge Articles, you can provide how-to guides, FAQs, and other relevant information that users can search. This knowledge base works as another level of automation, empowering users to solve the problem and preventing unnecessary tickets from being created.
5. Cost
Finally, JSMs reasonable pricing structure makes it a good choice for businesses of any size. JSM can scale with your business so you won’t have to worry about moving to a different service as your team grows.
Pricing varies by the number of agents or websites, the level of Atlassian support, storage requirements, and uptime SLA requirements. JSM can be used for free for up to three agents with a 2GB storage limit, providing an ideal way to trial the service risk-free before selecting the relevant pricing tier for your business.
Get Started with JSM
The sheer number of moving parts and team members involved means that ITSM implementations can be complex. From dealing with ad-hoc requests to incident and change management, ITSM affects many teams, so software like JSM is often needed to help manage workflows.
JSM has flexible pricing tiers for businesses of all sizes. Its sophisticated management tools allow agents to concentrate on completing their work, rather than managing it, promoting real-time collaboration within teams and with end users.
Published: Jun 29, 2022
