As the management and structure of enterprises continue to evolve, more and more companies are jumping on the modern business management approach and setting up enterprise service management (ESM) platforms. In fact, a 2021 industry survey found that most businesses use IT service management (ITSM) practices outside of their IT department.
With more innovation and technology come novel business models, new workflows, and an expansion in staffing. While this expansion is exciting, new challenges arise when it comes to cross-departmental collaboration, as teams run the risk of trapping themselves in silos. According to a 2021 report of aggregated data from 4,200 organizations around the globe, ITSM helped teams adapt to remote work, enabling them to resolve tickets 23 percent faster while working away from the office.
Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (JSM) is an ITSM solution that streamlines workflows and enhances the collaboration of developers, IT operators, and other departments within a modern organization. While initially oriented toward ITSM and DevOps practices, JSM has grown into a powerful solution for implementing ESM strategies as well. ESM empowers every employee — regardless of whether they work in IT — with the right tools to communicate and collaborate.
Managing Work with Jira Service Management
Atlassian released JSM in 2020 as an improvement to traditional service desks. With more ITSM functions to help departments of all shapes and sizes, JSM takes the concept of service desks to the next level.
Traditionally, service desks are the point of contact between a service provider (IT department) and the service user (employees seeking IT help). The implementation of ITSM principles makes it possible to offer IT as a service, creating a streamlined process that enhances the user experience, regardless of the service user’s level of tech knowledge.
IT service aside, Atlassian’s JSM solution also enhances DevOps workflows by allowing continuous feedback between the production team and customers throughout the entire development lifecycle. With automation and an open communication channel, JSM empowers DevOps teams by managing support tickets, client reviews, and incident reports all in one place.
Applying these ITSM techniques to the rest of the business structure and using ESM throughout the company are fundamental to modern multi-departmental businesses. Fortunately, Atlassian’s JSM solution provides a single platform for ITSM and ESM capabilities. Let’s look at some core features and explore how they help you enhance productivity, visibility, and quality of service.
Request Management
JSM enables you to manage requests by consolidating data from emails, messaging apps, your service desk, and other mediums. Machine learning (ML) technology groups these requests into actionable categories for your team to process. ML can help workers respond to tasks up to 15 percent faster by using past data.
JSM enables you to build an intuitive service desk that’s easy for your employees — even those with limited tech knowledge — to navigate and streamline requests to make them easier to handle.
Atlassian’s JSM also offers a ready-to-use knowledge base to help you set up a self-service portal quickly and efficiently. This enables your employees and clients to get answers to commonly asked questions without going through a live agent, saving you time and resources.
For example, consider how request management can benefit your human resources (HR) department. Instead of manually processing every leave and vacation request, your employees could submit their requests through the service desk and watch the approval status. Setting up this user-friendly ESM platform can improve your HR department’s efficiency, keep your employees informed and improve the employee experience.
Incident Management
Atlassian’s JSM solution is a boon to incident management, covering everything from escalation to communication to analytics, helping make your DevOps teams’ lives easier.
JSM mediates critical incidents by immediately notifying the correct teams to start working on resolutions. You can open chats using Slack or Microsoft Teams and set up video meetings to collaborate with your colleagues without leaving your ESM platform. Additionally, JSM enables you to link support tickets to the incidents, keeping everything organized on a consolidated platform. You can keep everyone on your team and your clients up to date about incidents with notification options such as email, SMS, and push notifications.
JSM also provides detailed reports and analytics throughout the incident management process. With these reports, you can pinpoint the cause of incidents and keep track of your teams’ progress as they work to resolve them.
Suppose a system fails, leading to downtime that impacts the customer or employee experience. JSM facilitates the incident management process by centralizing and filtering alerts from monitoring, logging, and CI/CD tools. This ensures teams respond to issues quickly while avoiding alert fatigue. Additionally, you can customize on-call schedules, routing rules, and escalation policies to handle alerts differently based on their importance and origin.
Problem Management
JSM simplifies problem management by grouping related incidents to identify repetitive issues, helping you launch investigations to determine the root causes and assign the right people to fix problems.
By providing a clear overview of the entire process and all the related incidents, JSM helps you find resolutions and minimizes any potential lasting consequences of the problem. Reports and analytics can also identify if any issues are recurring and where they start, ensuring you can tackle them at their roots.
For example, your general operations team can benefit from JSM’s problem management ability. By grouping all the incidents into broader categories and providing you with reports to see the big picture, this platform can help you streamline your problem-solving processes throughout your organization.
Change Management
When it comes to developmental changes within your company, problems may arise as you shift your team members from one methodology to another. Atlassian’s JSM empowers your teams by providing risk assessments and managing approval workflows.
JSM automation can score the risks of a change to determine the level of risk and whether it qualifies for automatic approval for implementation or requires escalation for review. You can also assign specialized authority to specific teams on the approval line, so everyone understands their responsibilities. Delegating specialized authority will, in turn, help you avoid bottlenecks during your change process.
For instance, JSM’s change management capabilities can help your IT operations team by providing change requests with full context about a change, the teams involved, and any related work. JSM delivers a single view of information about CI/CD tools, affected services, risk scores, and required approvers. By providing everything the team needs to know on one ESM platform, your IT operations team will always be able to make optimal decisions with clear ideas about the impacts of these decisions.
Asset Management
Atlassian’s JSM solution offers a flexible system to help your teams manage assets of all kinds. These can include everything from equipment to employees.
JSM keeps track of inventory and data for auditing and organizes the details to help you make informed decisions to tackle incidents. Because all the data is directly in Jira, it’s easy for teams to access the information they need to manage, maintain, upgrade, or deploy any asset.
While asset management is crucial for the IT department, other teams can also benefit. For example, HR can use this open database structure to keep track of all the employees within the enterprise and stay on top of each person’s salary, vacation dates, status, and more.
Configuration Management
JSM supports configuration management by giving you complete visibility into your projects and assets. With dependency mapping, you get a clear picture of the entire project lifecycle to assess risks, resolve problems, and quickly get to the root cause of any discrepancies. And with JSM automation, you can also automate status updates, create new tickets based on changes, and add new assets.
For example, JSM’s configuration management can help you minimize change risks by giving developers a clear view of which configurations and services may be affected by the change. And if there are any problems, teams can address them quickly with the valuable insights provided, as JSM keeps track of all incidents and changes. Additionally, because all updates to configuration items are tracked automatically, JSM can save you a lot of time when audits come around.
Knowledge Management
Atlassian’s JSM solution’s knowledge management capability provides a single source of knowledge, so your employees and clients retain near-immediate access to accurate, adequately documented information.
By leveraging the power of Confluence, JSM encourages self-service by providing users with an easy-to-use access point to relevant instructions and articles in your database. Self-service empowers your teams to be more self-sufficient and saves your service team time.
JSM’s machine learning algorithm also ensures that search results are specifically for your users. Additionally, JSM offers statistics to determine which articles solve the most problems and where there might be knowledge gaps you can fill.
For instance, consider your legal team’s applications of JSM and Confluence as an ESM solution. With a knowledge management platform that offers detailed articles on commonly asked legal questions, team members outside this department can stay informed and get their questions answered before contacting the legal department. If they do have to reach out to the legal team, JSM offers a self-service platform that enables clients to check the statuses of their legal requests without having to locate or take time away from their legal team members.
Conclusion
Atlassian’s JSM platform is a one-stop solution for your ITSM and ESM needs. Although Atlassian originally oriented JSM towards IT service management and DevOps practices, you can apply Jira Service Management capabilities to a wide variety of workflows throughout an organization. More than just a service desk, JSM has everything you need to help your teams manage their work and empower every department to provide a high-velocity service experience.
From request management to knowledge management, it’s time to step into the future by implementing ITSM practices in every corner of your enterprise. Ready to leverage Atlassian’s JSM to support your ITSM and ESM strategies?
Reach out to Praecipio, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, to learn how we can support your ITSM journey.
