Revolutionizing ITSM: A Guide to Jira Service Management Fundamentals

IT Service Management (ITSM) isn’t just about managing IT work; it’s about transforming how your entire organization functions. From simple end-user requests (like a new Adobe account) to complex infrastructure needs (like provisioning a server), ITSM streamlines every IT process. Jira Service Management (JSM) is revolutionizing this landscape, going beyond traditional ITSM to optimize how you design, deliver, and support IT services. In this guide, we’ll dive into some Jira Service Management fundamentals and show you how Atlassian’s powerful tool is reshaping the future of IT.

Modern ITSM software must empower IT teams and their global collaborators to manage work seamlessly and collaborate effortlessly. It needs to provide the agility and scalability needed to meet evolving business and technology demands, while supercharging customer service — all without creating data silos or process bottlenecks. 

High-performing teams thrive when empowered to work in ways that best suit their needs while aligning with the organization’s goals; it’s a delicate balance of autonomy and alignment. Poorly implemented autonomy breeds data silos, obscures visibility, and wastes time as IT grapples with disjointed tools. Mistaking alignment for control stifles innovation, slows progress, hinders collaboration, and limits scalability. 

Jira Service Management is designed to empower all types of teams, and mastering its fundamentals unlocks that value from the start. 

Jira Service Management’s Power for ITSM

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management strikes a balance between autonomy and alignment, fueling its rising popularity. Gartner recognized this strength by naming Atlassian a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for ITSM Tools.

Grounded in the latest ITIL practices, Jira Service Management unites all teams on a powerful, scalable platform with a single, intuitive interface designed to elevate customer service. However, even the most advanced tools require a strategic approach to maximize their value. Let’s dive into the Jira Service Management fundamentals that will unlock your full potential and deliver the highest return on investment.

Establishing a Strong Foundation

Request forms power Jira Service Management’s customer portals, serving as the primary interaction point for both internal and external users. They’re the engine that unlocks JSM’s full value, as customer portals don’t mandate a JSM license for access (although you can configure JSM to require an Atlassian account). Even with robust knowledge bases integrated into your portals, users will inevitably submit requests. Therefore, creating exceptional portals and request forms is the critical first step in mastering Jira Service Management fundamentals.

Streamlining Your Service Request Forms

Customers, both internal and external, benefit from a well-balanced selection of request types and groups. Too many options can overwhelm, while too few can limit their ability to find the right fit. If you’re just starting, begin with fewer options and add more as needed based on user feedback and JSM’s reporting features. Additionally, tailor the visible request types to each customer’s needs for a more personalized experience.

Craft request type names and descriptions from the customer’s perspective, not the agent’s. “Provision new hardware” might resonate with IT, but users are more likely to search for “Request new computer or mobile device.”

Make request forms user-friendly with clear descriptions and instructions. Guide users to provide the precise information JSM agents need to fulfill requests promptly. Use hidden fields to automatically route requests to the right team without requiring any extra effort from the customer.

Leverage Jira’s Forms feature to create dynamic forms with conditional field display. This reduces clutter by showing only relevant fields based on the user’s selections. For example, the form for “Request new computer or mobile device” could first ask the user to specify the hardware type, then display only the fields relevant to that choice. By minimizing irrelevant information, you streamline the process, reduce confusion, and enhance the user experience. This conditional logic can also help consolidate request types, making it easier for customers to find what they need.

Crafting an Intuitive Customer Portal: A Step-by-Step Guide

Effective Jira Service Management (JSM) portals go beyond well-designed request types and forms. Let’s explore additional steps you can take to ensure your portals deliver exceptional support to your customers.

1. Optimize the Portal Home Page

The portal home page serves as a central hub where customers can search and access all configured portals within your JSM instance. Its importance grows with the number of portals you have, as it allows users to easily navigate and find the resources they need.

• Add a login message: Orient new users with helpful information and instructions.
• Set the Help Center Name: This appears in browser tabs and navigation breadcrumbs, providing context for users.
• Set the Home Page Title: Displayed above the search bar, this title clearly indicates which portal the user is currently viewing.
• Add your logo: Reinforce your branding and provide a link back to the portal home page.
• Upload a Help Center Banner image: Customize the visual appearance of your portal with a background image that aligns with your brand.
• Set banner background color and link/button colors: Further tailor the portal’s appearance by choosing specific colors.
• Set Home Page Title color: Ensure optimal readability against the banner image or color.
• Add “topics”: Organize request forms, external resources, and knowledge articles into collections for easy browsing.
• Highlight “featured portals”: Increase visibility for frequently used portals.
• Hide portals: Restrict access to specific portals by requiring direct URLs.

2. Customize Each Customer Portal

Each portal can be further customized to cater to specific customer needs.

• Add introduction text: Provide guidance, tips, or instructions to assist users.
• Add external websites: Share relevant resources in a “Related Resources” section.
• Group request forms: Enhance browsing by organizing forms into logical groups.
• Highlight knowledge base articles: Promote self-service by showcasing helpful articles in categories.

Prioritize User Experience

By following these steps, you empower customers with a user-friendly, informative, and visually appealing portal experience. This not only streamlines their interactions but also sets your service teams up for success by ensuring efficient and effective communication.

Harnessing Automation for Efficiency

Every team grapples with repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drain valuable resources. Why burden your employees with tracking down signatures or navigating complex approval processes?

Free your team to focus on high-value work that drives your organization forward. Jira Service Management offers two powerful features designed to eliminate manual effort and streamline workflows.

Optimizing Processes with Automation

Automated Ticket Actions and Approvals

JSM’s project-level Automation feature enables you to create simple “if-then” rules that trigger specific actions when predefined events occur. You have complete control over the setup:

• Triggers: Define the events that initiate the rule, such as issue creation or status changes.
• Conditions: Specify additional criteria that must be met for the rule to execute.
• Actions: Choose the automated response, such as commenting on an issue, sending an email, or assigning the issue to a specific team member.

You can also leverage built-in templates or create custom rules tailored to your specific needs. Common use cases include automatically setting reviewers or approvers based on priority, risk level, or customer.

Streamlined Workflows

Automation rules are easily configurable and can be toggled on or off as needed, providing flexibility for project-specific adjustments. For more complex automation scenarios, JSM offers workflow customizations that are shareable and more powerful, giving you a comprehensive toolkit to optimize your processes.

Seamless Integrations

JSM’s Automation seamlessly integrates with various external systems, allowing you to trigger actions in other tools or receive data from them. For example, you can automatically update your ERP system when a critical bug fix is released in Jira Software, ensuring smooth coordination between teams. You can also use webhooks to establish two-way communication between JSM and other systems, enabling real-time updates and seamless collaboration.

Empowering Teams Through Automation

JSM’s Automation capabilities offer a wealth of possibilities, with a wide range of triggers, conditions, and actions to choose from. You can even create custom variables and lookup tables to enhance the flexibility of your automation rules.

To maximize the benefits of automation, start by engaging your team in brainstorming sessions to identify the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Once you’ve gathered their insights, your project or Jira administrators can then translate these ideas into actionable automation rules.

By harnessing the power of automation, you free your employees from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on meaningful work that drives your organization forward.

Mastering Intelligent Workflows

Jira Service Management projects come equipped with built-in workflows, which you can customize or replace entirely. Each workflow can be tailored to specific issue types and, unlike automation rules, can be reused across multiple projects. While workflows primarily track a ticket’s state or phase (e.g., In Progress, Submitted for Review), JSM workflows offer much more through three powerful features:

Conditions: These logic tests determine whether a transition is visible to the user. You can control visibility based on user roles, specific field values, or other criteria. This ensures users only see relevant options, streamlining their interaction with the workflow and reducing administrative overhead.

Validators: These checkpoints verify the content of ticket fields against your predefined criteria. By blocking transitions with incomplete or inaccurate data, validators guarantee data integrity, preventing downstream delays and frustration.

Post Functions: Executed during status transitions, post functions perform actions such as reassigning tickets, clearing or setting field values, sending notifications, and triggering web hooks to interact with external systems. While some overlap exists with automation functionality, workflows offer several advantages:

No usage limits: Unlike some JSM Cloud plans, workflows have no execution limits.
Clearer troubleshooting: Workflows provide a transparent, sequential execution order, which makes it easier to identify and resolve issues compared to the simultaneous firing of multiple automation rules.
Field validation: Workflows offer field validation capabilities not available in automation.
Reusability: Workflows can be reused across projects, eliminating the need to recreate automation rules for each project or make them global.

By understanding and leveraging these features, you can create intelligent workflows that optimize your processes, improve data quality, and enhance overall efficiency within Jira Service Management.

Amplify Efficiency with Integrated Automation

By automating repetitive tasks and customizing workflows, you empower your existing employees to work more efficiently, enabling your organization to scale faster. Jira Service Management’s seamless integration with other Atlassian products like Jira Software, Bamboo, and Bitbucket unlocks even greater potential. Imagine these possibilities:

• Automated updates: Every time one product updates another, a comment is automatically added to the relevant issue, keeping everyone informed.
• Streamlined change management: Code commits in Jira Software automatically trigger change requests in JSM.
• Effortless approvals: Standard change requests are auto-approved, with relevant information like service impact and risk level automatically populated.
• Seamless communication: When a new product feature is released, related development issues are automatically closed, and sales and marketing teams receive notifications.
• Rapid incident response: Critical service outages automatically trigger a master incident ticket, assigned to the appropriate team or individual for immediate action.
• Dynamic approvals: Approval workflows adapt based on the type of change, associated risk, or procedures defined by your change advisory board.

This is just a glimpse of what’s possible when you integrate JSM with your existing tools and processes. By harnessing the power of automation and integration, you can create a truly efficient and responsive IT service management ecosystem.

Maximizing the Power of Your Knowledge Bases

Studies show that knowledge workers spend a staggering 20–30% of their time searching for information, disrupting productivity and hindering efficiency. Recognizing this challenge, ITIL 4 includes Knowledge Management as a core ITSM practice.

At the heart of Knowledge Management lies the knowledge base (KB): a self-service online library of information about products, services, departments, or topics, all easily accessible through a powerful search engine. Each KB article you create becomes a reusable resource, answering customer questions time and again. While KBs are often seen as customer-facing tools for self-service, Jira Service Management also leverages KBs to empower team members working on service requests.

Empowering Customers with Self-Service

It’s a win-win: when customers find answers to their questions or the right forms for their needs through your knowledge base (KB), it saves your team’s time and your organization’s money. This is the power of request deflection. Moreover, many customers prefer self-service, so offering a comprehensive, user-friendly KB with robust search capabilities significantly boosts customer satisfaction.

Jira Service Management (JSM) seamlessly integrates with your knowledge bases. As customers start entering their request summary in a JSM portal connected to a KB, the portal dynamically searches the KB for relevant articles and displays them as “Suggested Articles” for the user to review.

To ensure a targeted experience, Confluence (where JSM’s KBs reside) allows you to label articles. You can then configure each JSM project to use specific labels when suggesting articles. For example, label HR-related articles as “hr” and set the Billing request type to only consider articles labeled “billing.” This prevents customers from wading through irrelevant search results, saving them valuable time.

The best part? Your portal searches become smarter over time. JSM employs machine learning to analyze user search behavior, article views, and engagement, continuously refining its suggestions for a more personalized and effective self-service experience.

Empowering Agents with Knowledge

While your customer portal’s KB search aims to provide relevant articles, it might not always capture every nuance of a user’s query. That’s where JSM’s agent-facing KB integration comes in.

Within a KB-connected JSM project, agents can easily access potentially helpful articles while viewing a ticket. A Knowledge Base field dynamically updates, indicating the number of articles that match the keywords in the ticket’s Summary. Agents can then quickly review and search the list, and with a single click, share a relevant article directly with the customer through a comment. Even better, agents can create new KB articles directly from the ticket, ensuring your knowledge base continuously grows and evolves.

Prioritize Knowledge Base Quality

Even if a portal user finds the perfect KB article for their needs, it won’t be helpful if it’s poorly written. While optimizing KB articles is a complex topic that deserves its own discussion, let’s cover some essential best practices:

• Not everyone possesses strong writing skills. Often, subject matter experts are tasked with creating KB articles, but technical writing requires a separate skill set. It involves presenting complex information in a way that resonates with the target audience. While hiring dedicated writers might incur additional costs, it’s an investment in your customers’ experience. Providing clear, concise, and engaging content can ultimately save you money by reducing support requests and boosting user satisfaction.
  
• Engage visually, not distractingly. Most KB users seek specific information within an article. A wall of undifferentiated text with no visual cues makes it difficult for users to find what they need. Visual learners require more than just text to comprehend complex concepts, and visual variety can help maintain reader engagement. Utilize headers, formatting, layout, and relevant images to create a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate article. However, avoid excessive visual clutter, as it can hinder readability. Strive for a balance that enhances the user experience.
  
• Maintain knowledge base accuracy. Your knowledge base is a living resource that requires ongoing attention. Implement a process to ensure KB articles remain accurate and up-to-date. Ideally, every system change should trigger a review of relevant KB articles. Even with this practice, regular audits are essential. Outdated or incorrect information can be more harmful than no information at all.

By prioritizing the quality and usability of your KB articles, you empower your customers with the tools they need to self-serve, reducing the burden on your support team and fostering a positive user experience.

Gaining Insights for Continuous Improvement

As your organization grows, maintaining efficiency and exceptional customer service becomes paramount. Jira Service Management equips you with the tools to strike that balance. By continuously collecting real-time data on your team’s service delivery, you unlock valuable insights that drive improvement.

With Jira’s native search and filtering capabilities, built-in reporting, and powerful reporting plugins available in the Atlassian Marketplace, you can harness this data to analyze and understand crucial aspects of your operations:

• Employee needs and pain points: Identify what employees truly need from different teams, gaining valuable insights into their work experience and uncovering opportunities for improvement.
• Interdepartmental bottlenecks: Pinpoint and address inefficiencies that hinder cross-functional collaboration and service delivery.
• Internal team bottlenecks: Uncover approval process bottlenecks or other internal roadblocks that slow down your team’s progress.
• Process optimization: Analyze your data to discover best practices for managing process changes within and between teams, ensuring continuous evolution and refinement.

Think of it as fine-tuning your organization’s engine for peak performance. Just as a winning Indy 500 car requires constant measurement, analysis, and adjustment, your organization thrives on data-driven insights that fuel ongoing improvement.

Reporting and Dashboards: Your Real-Time Insight Engine

In Jira Service Management (JSM), a “report” typically refers to a chart generated within a project’s Reports page. However, it can also describe a table of search results delivered via email. Both types of reports seamlessly integrate into JSM dashboards, providing dynamic, real-time insights.

Jira Service Management Reports: Your Performance Snapshot

JSM provides a variety of reports to give you insights into your team’s performance and customer satisfaction. While you cannot modify the default reports, the time-based ones allow you to select the desired time period. Here’s what you’ll find in every JSM project:

Default Reports

• Workload: Tracks the number of requests assigned to each agent, allowing you to identify and address workload imbalances.
• Satisfaction: (Requires enabling Collect satisfaction (CSAT) feedback) Displays the average customer satisfaction rating for your team, providing valuable feedback on service quality.
• Requests deflected: Measures the effectiveness of your knowledge bases by showing how many times customers found KB articles helpful in the portal.
• Requests resolved: Shows the number of requests resolved with and without KB articles, offering additional insights into KB effectiveness.

You can run these reports individually or add them to a dashboard for real-time monitoring and easy access to the latest data.

Custom Reports

Custom reports come pre-configured for immediate use, but you can also tailor them by changing the name and modifying the data series displayed in the chart. Add new series or modify existing ones to meet your specific needs. The following custom reports are available in every JSM project unless otherwise specified, each plotting the specified data per day for the selected time period:

• Created vs. Resolved: Compare the number of requests created and resolved over time to gauge your team’s workload management and identify any potential bottlenecks. Are you keeping up with demand? Are there weekly or monthly patterns in request creation? This report reveals it all.
• Time to Resolution: Track the average time it takes to resolve requests for different types, priorities, and other configurable parameters. Discover if your team is improving resolution times or facing challenges. Are there recurring patterns? This report helps you pinpoint areas for optimization.
• SLA Met vs. Breached: Monitor your adherence to service level agreements (SLAs). Identify how often SLAs are met or breached and investigate any patterns. This report is crucial for maintaining service commitments and identifying improvement opportunities.
• SLA Success Rate: Evaluate your team’s overall performance against SLA goals. Track each SLA individually and identify areas where your team excels or needs improvement. This report helps you proactively address issues and enhance service delivery.
• Service Requests: Analyze the volume of requests by type to understand customer needs and trends. Discover if specific request types are increasing or decreasing, and uncover any patterns that can inform your resource allocation and service prioritization.
• Incidents by Priority (Incident Management): If you’re using JSM’s Incident Management feature, this report compares the priority of reported incidents. It helps you monitor trends in high-priority incidents, identify potential problem areas, and allocate resources effectively.
• Problems by Priority (Incident Management): Similar to the previous report, this one focuses on problem priorities. By analyzing trends and patterns, you can proactively address recurring issues and minimize their impact on service delivery.
• Changes by Type (Change Management): With the Change Management feature enabled, this report shows the distribution of standard, normal, and emergency changes. Monitor trends in emergency changes and identify any patterns that can help you optimize your change management process.
• Time to Approve Normal Change (Change Management): Evaluate your team’s adherence to SLAs for normal changes. Identify how often SLAs are met or breached and uncover any recurring patterns. This report is essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your change approval process.

Tailor Your Custom Reports for Actionable Insights

With JSM’s custom reports, you have the power to modify, delete, and add to the pre-configured data series, as well as rename the reports themselves. This flexibility allows you to tailor your reports to your specific needs and gain deeper insights into your service desk performance.

• Need a detailed SLA breakdown? Modify the SLA Met vs Breached report to display each SLA criterion as a separate series.
• Curious if request volume impacts SLAs? Add series for each SLA (or criterion) to the Support Requests report.
• Investigating a correlation between emergency changes and problem reports? Add a series for emergency changes to the Problems by Priority report.

The possibilities are endless. You can run these custom reports on demand or add them to a dashboard that automatically refreshes, ensuring you always have the most up-to-date information at your fingertips.

Filter Reports and Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data

Filtering reports offers a powerful way to slice and dice your JSM data based on specific criteria. By applying filters to your searches, you can create focused reports that answer specific questions and highlight key trends.

Dashboards

Dashboards in JSM provide a centralized view of your most important metrics and insights. With a variety of gadgets to choose from, you can create custom dashboards tailored to your team’s needs.

Standard Gadgets

JSM offers over two dozen standard gadgets, including:

• Activity Stream: Displays recent activities in configured projects and issue types.
• Filter Results: Shows issues returned by a saved filter, allowing you to visualize filtered data.
• Issues Calendar: Presents a calendar view of issue due dates, aiding in deadline management.
• Pie Chart: Displays a pie chart breakdown of issues based on a selected field, providing a quick overview of data distribution.

You can also find additional gadgets in the Atlassian Marketplace or even develop your own custom gadgets.

Real-Time Dashboards

By default, gadgets display data as of when the dashboard loads. However, you can configure any gadget to refresh every 15 minutes. This allows you to create real-time dashboards, also known as wallboards, that continuously display up-to-date information to your team.

Turning Feedback into Action: A Guide to CSAT Data

“You can’t improve what you don’t understand.” This fundamental principle applies to all customer service interactions, including those facilitated through your portal.

Imagine onboarding new team members to handle portal requests. While JSM’s reports measure their performance within the system, they don’t reveal the crucial element: customer satisfaction.

Enter CSAT (customer satisfaction) measurement. By enabling CSAT Feedback in your project settings, the “request resolved” email sent to customers includes a 1-5 star rating option. Upon selecting a rating, a webpage opens, allowing them to confirm or change their rating and provide additional comments.

JSM’s built-in Customer Satisfaction report presents the average rating, comment count, and detailed feedback data, including comments, ratings, request IDs, assignees, and dates received.

You can also design custom reports that leverage the Satisfaction and Satisfaction Date fields. Analyze feedback by request type, issue type, agent, team, or other relevant dimensions. If the standard CSAT survey is too limited, you can customize the resolution email using Automation or explore apps from the Atlassian Marketplace to expand JSM’s capabilities.

CSAT reports work synergistically with custom reports. For instance, if one request type receives lower satisfaction scores, understanding its frequency is crucial. A request type accounting for 75% of the total warrants more attention than one representing 25%. Similarly, if your team’s average CSAT rating drops, you can investigate if it’s due to a specific agent’s performance or an uneven workload distribution.

JSM’s Customer Satisfaction feature illuminates your path, enabling you to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement in your customer service efforts.

Embracing Collaboration and Integrations: Empowering Every Team

While Jira Service Management (JSM) originated as a tool for IT teams, it has evolved into a comprehensive Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platform that empowers all types of business teams. By providing a seamless and predictable help experience for both internal and external stakeholders, JSM’s value multiplies as more teams adopt it. Even Atlassian itself leverages 130 internal service desks, demonstrating the power and scalability of ESM.

Every team handles requests, whether from colleagues or external customers. HR manages time-off requests, Facilities addresses maintenance issues, Finance allocates budgets, Legal reviews contracts, and the list goes on. Instead of each team relying on separate software and processes, JSM offers a unified solution. Each team can establish its own JSM service portal and knowledge base (KB), streamlining interactions and eliminating confusion for both employees and IT.

But JSM’s benefits for business teams extend beyond standardized service portals. The ITIL 4 practices that underpin JSM’s features offer advantages for teams across the entire organization. Here are a few examples:

Change Management: While business teams may not have the sort of mission-critical infrastructure as IT, their services are often time-sensitive and vital to organizational success. For example, swift collaboration between HR and IT is crucial when a delayed project requires an emergency contractor. Additionally, in a growing organization, every team’s ability to adapt processes smoothly is paramount.  

JSM’s Change Management establishes a framework that streamlines the change process, prioritizing critical changes, allocating resources effectively, and involving necessary stakeholders from dev and IT for approvals.

Incident and Problem Management: Even well-defined business processes can encounter hiccups. Incidents like payroll errors can cause confusion, frustration, and lost productivity. While identifying the immediate cause is important, truly improving service quality requires delving deeper. JSM empowers teams to investigate the underlying factors and conditions that led to the incident.

With JSM’s Incident and Problem Management, business teams can continuously learn from incidents, track and assess known problems, conduct thorough investigations, and create a record of known errors, ultimately leading to improved procedures and enhanced service delivery.

Low-Code Automation: Repetitive tasks plague every team, wasting valuable time and resources. JSM’s Automation feature provides a solution.

As discussed above, JSM’s project-level Automation allows you to create simple “if-then” rules that trigger automated actions based on predefined events. These digital workflows handle routing, information gathering, SLA application, approvals, escalations, notifications, and much more. By automating mundane tasks, you free your employees to focus on strategic initiatives that drive your organization’s growth.

JSM offers a range of project templates tailored for HR, Facilities, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and other departments. These templates provide pre-built components like request types, forms, queues, and workflows that are ready to use out of the box. You can easily customize these components to perfectly align with your team’s specific needs.

However, the true power of JSM emerges when multiple teams embrace it. Imagine a new employee onboarding request submitted to HR. With JSM, this single request can automatically trigger a cascade of actions:

• A request to IT for desk equipment.
• A request to Facilities for a security access card.
• And any other necessary requests for different departments.

All these requests are linked, providing HR agents with a comprehensive view of the onboarding progress directly within the ticket. You can even add a custom status to indicate that HR has completed their tasks but is awaiting responses from other departments. Once all related requests are resolved, the original onboarding request automatically closes.

This is just one example of how JSM fosters seamless collaboration and streamlines cross-functional processes. By integrating JSM across your organization, you create a unified platform where teams work together efficiently, eliminating silos and accelerating service delivery.

Integrations for a Unified Ecosystem: Amplifying JSM’s Impact

Beyond mastering JSM’s core features, two additional strategies can significantly enhance your return on investment: integrating with other Atlassian products and connecting to external systems.

In today’s data-driven world, work often revolves around information. When data remains isolated in disparate systems, it hinders your ability to form a comprehensive understanding of your organization. However, as Big Data tools evolve, integrating your tools allows you to access a richer, more granular view of the big picture. Each integration you add to JSM eliminates errors, delays, and inefficiencies caused by siloed data.

The Atlassian Cloud Platform: A Connected Ecosystem

The Atlassian Cloud platform boasts 19 products, many of which seamlessly integrate with JSM to unify data and workflows across your organization. Here are a few standout tools:

• Jira Software (now Jira): Collaborate on big ideas and manage projects for all teams with this powerful project management tool.
• Confluence: Organize work, create documents, and foster discussions in one central hub.
• Statuspage: Keep users informed during incidents and minimize support requests with transparent communication.
• Opsgenie: Ensure timely incident response with powerful alerting and on-call scheduling.
• Trello: Boost collaboration and productivity with fun, flexible, and visually engaging project boards.
• Beacon: Safeguard your Atlassian Cloud products with intelligent threat detection, investigation, and remediation capabilities.

Many of these products offer free plans, making it easy to explore and experience their benefits firsthand.

Atlassian’s mission extends beyond helping teams; it aims to revolutionize how teams work, transforming them into powerful, efficient, and user-centric engines of productivity. Atlassian products serve as the components of this engine, and the more you incorporate, the greater the transformation.

For instance, Confluence not only provides the knowledge base for JSM but also serves as a versatile platform for internal documentation, project plans, meeting notes, brainstorming sessions, and more. You can even create overview pages that display real-time JSM data.

Similarly, Trello empowers teams and individuals to manage their work independently. Its intuitive interface facilitates task management, project tracking, meeting organization, editorial calendars, client management, and various other use cases.

By leveraging the Atlassian Cloud platform, you create a cohesive ecosystem where tools work together seamlessly, enhancing collaboration, streamlining processes, and unlocking your team’s full potential.

Integrating with Other Systems: Enhancing Connectivity and Data Flow

While specialized systems like CRM and DevOps tools are essential, most organizations also rely on external systems for specific functions. Often, data in these systems overlaps with JSM data. For example, JSM maintains customer lists, while your CRM tool handles detailed customer information. Integrating your CRM with JSM allows you to leverage the specialized features of both tools while eliminating duplicate customer data.

JSM’s extensibility enables seamless integration with a wide range of systems, unlocking significant efficiency gains. Let’s explore the different integration methods available:

System-specific apps: Available in the Atlassian Marketplace, these apps are designed to integrate specific systems with JSM, such as Microsoft 365, Structure PPM, or Salesforce. They can synchronize data sets between the two systems, allowing you to manage data in the external system without duplicating efforts in JSM. Additionally, they can bring external system functionality into JSM or enable you to interact with JSM through the external system. For example, you can work with Sharepoint content directly in JSM while creating and accessing JSM issues from your Outlook email.

Web requests: Many modern systems offer REST APIs that enable custom interactions. You can send data to the external system and receive a response, or have it send data to JSM for processing. This can involve retrieving data for display, updating records, creating new entries, triggering notifications, and more. In JSM, you can add a “Send web request” action to an Automation rule or a “Trigger a Webhook” post function to a workflow (created by an admin). This method allows you to create precise, tailored interactions between JSM and external systems without relying on third-party apps.

Custom workflow development: This is the most powerful, yet most complex, integration option. By leveraging Atlassian Marketplace apps like Scriptrunner, you can write custom code for workflow conditions, validators, or post functions, enabling highly sophisticated interactions with external systems. You can utilize the Jira API, as well as any other APIs you have access to, and even interact directly with the Jira database. This flexibility allows you to work with data beyond JSM’s standard capabilities. However, custom code requires careful maintenance and testing to ensure compatibility with updates to JSM, its database, or the external system.

Unleash Your Organization’s Potential with Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management (JSM) is more than just a tool; it’s a catalyst for transformation. By implementing the fundamentals we’ve explored, you can unlock a multitude of benefits:

• Deflect tickets: Empower customers with self-service through comprehensive knowledge bases.
• Reduce triage time: Automate routing and prioritization for faster response times.
• Escalate efficiently: Streamline escalation processes for critical issues.
• Accelerate resolution: Improve time-to-resolution through automation and collaboration.
• Eliminate waste: Optimize processes and eliminate manual bottlenecks.
• Enhance customer satisfaction: Deliver exceptional service experiences that build loyalty.
• Empower employees: Enable teams to work autonomously and efficiently.
• Scale rapidly: Adapt and grow your service operations with ease.

Don’t just take our word for it. A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Atlassian revealed significant ROI for organizations using JSM. For an average company with 10,000 employees, JSM delivered:

• $1.4 million in productivity improvements over three years
• $2 million in cost savings
• 115 hours recovered per month for IT Ops, with 25% faster change request approvals
• Return on investment within six months
• A staggering 277% ROI
• $4.19 million in total benefits over three years

Atlassian’s commitment to delivering value is evident in every JSM feature. They often develop these features internally, ensuring they are battle-tested and proven to benefit teams and organizations before becoming available to you.

By mastering the fundamentals of JSM and embracing its full potential, you set your organization on a path toward increased efficiency, transparency, velocity, alignment, and ultimately, a greater return on your investment.

• Atlassian Support: Documentation and resources for all Atlassian products
• Jira Support: Troubleshooting and how-to articles for Jira products
• Atlassian Community: Get product advice from experts, take free classes, and more.

And you may find these articles useful.

• 5 Jira Hacks for Effective Scaling: These hacks will help you maximize both your Jira ROI and your teams’ effectiveness.
• Top 5 JSM Best Practices: Key features that deliver value to all teams
• ESM – The Natural Extension of ITSM: Introduction to ESM, its relationship to ITSM, and how Jira Service Management’s ESM features enable continuous improvement.
• ESM Practices: Improving interdepartmental efficiency and collaboration

Take the next step towards a more efficient, collaborative, and customer-centric IT service organization. Contact Oxalis today for a personalized demo of Jira Service Management.