Overview
Problem, change, and incident management requires ITSM best practices and properly configured tools in order to be effective. This is especially true for a Fortune 20 Enterprise that needs scalable processes (and the software to support it). When our client, a global electronics leader, recognized their need to have their Atlassian applications reflect and facilitate ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), they turned to us for help. Applying our extensive experience and knowledge with ITIL/ ITSM, we optimized their work practice and patterns and successfully implemented Jira Software and Confluence to help them achieve a streamlined set of processes for managing, tracking, and communicating their incidents, problems, resulting in significant reductions in meantime to recovery and resolution, increased meantime between failures, and greatly improved customer and IT Support personnel job satisfaction.
THE CHALLENGE
Our client's R&D IT department recently experienced significant growth, and thus felt the strain of unscalable processes. While they were already users of Atlassian, our client's applications did not reflect ITIL best practices, nor were their applications configured to facilitate these desired standards. Prior to our engagement, our client relied on loose processes for incident, problem, and change management and related communications. Issues were not well understood, prioritized, or easily resolved; furthermore, reference of issues (for root cause analysis) or analysis was elusive, as our client lacked appropriate methods to work and report on issues across the department. Without organization, transparency, and hierarchy of issues, our client was unable to be effective in their practices wasting valuable resources.
THE SOLUTION
We worked with our client's subject matter experts to define optimized practices and patterns with a custom configuration of Jira and Confluence to facilitate automation and sustainable, repeatable ITSM processes. We provided a Jira configuration including workflows, screens, and fields that matched the client's needs for effective incident, problem, and change management. Leveraging the Create on Transition add-on, incidents automatically link to the related Jira issues for their fix, providing traceability without additional effort. Additionally, we helped our client leverage appropriate Jira hierarchies to more accurately track. Consolidating much of IT communication efforts, updates made to Jira issues now trigger email notifications to relevant groups and also automatically update a custom Confluence status page. Within Confluence, not only did we provide our client a way to see centralized status communications of incidents, but we also configured templates and utilized macros to create an archival infrastructure to make Confluence an on-going register of all incidents, problems, and changes.
THE RESULTS
With our configuration of Jira and Confluence, our client realized automation gains for increased efficiency and full traceability of ITSM processes, enabling ITOps to decrease MTTR (mean time to resolution) and increase MTBF (mean time between failures). IT Support personnel are able to focus on core competencies, now having Atlassian applications that enforce and facilitate efficient, measurable ITSM best practices. Our expertise and Atlassian services helped our client achieve matured IT Service Management processes, leveraging ITIL best practices, for improved problem, change, and incident management. Our client, with whom we've worked (and continue to work with) on other Atlassian projects, noted that the value of our expertise and repeated delivery of work that exceeds their expectations makes us trustworthy partners.
