In an age where there’s a tool for every toil, we’re fortunate at Praecipio Consulting to be able to work with the best tools available. As an Executive Assistant who survives on staying organized, ahead of the game, and juggling with an exceptional attitude is just part of the day-to-day. If you hear “How do you do it?” you are not alone. How do I do it? The right tools.

One of the most powerful integrations in the Atlassian ecosystem is the native link between Jira and Confluence. For users working in both tools, the transition can be seamless if you do it right, but clunky if you don't. 

Now, what if I told you there was just one Confluence macro you could start using today that will immediately make reporting in Confluence easier and help you (and your team) keep track of your work? The Jira Issues macro is the go-to when reporting in Confluence.

Here are some tips to get your team to live their Atlassian life-to-the-fullest.

While service desk agents do everything they can to avoid firefighting, they are often focused on extinguishing one fire and moving to the next. This usually causes tickets to smolder in some status of "not quite done" until months later when they will finally be closed out (thanks bulk edit!). The good news: there is a way to keep things moving using out-of-the-box functionality. No longer will your metrics be inaccurate because people aren't "moving their tickets through the system." Jira Service Desk can help do the moving for you with automation.

What, why?

My favorite class in college was Neural networks for non-linear control systems which was way out of my league but I wanted it, so I powered through. I majored in mechanical engineering and studied computer science and electrical engineering because of a passion for robotics. This class blew my mind. Life being what it is, I went off to build a career which took me away from machine learning until recently. Things have come a long way in the intervening years and I wanted to recreate the approach we used in this class.

Guest blog post by Erin Jones, Partner Manager, xMatters

Access your monitoring platform and find the alert. Export the data report. Create an issue in Jira, then attach the data report. Search assignees and add all necessary parties to the ticket. Spin up a chat room for the incident to facilitate swarming. Log into your StatusPage and let your users know about the incident, at each stage, as you can now finally get around to resolving it.

Search engines have the ability to house a plethora of information that helps users find the answers they're looking for. As more information gets pumped into a search engine or knowledge base, the importance of finding what's relevant becomes increasingly important.

ITSM Metrics 

There's a common saying that you can't manage what you can't (or don't) measure. Often attributed to Peter Drucker, the godfather of Business Management, the thought here is one must clearly define success criteria, establish a benchmark, and track variance in order to realize improvement and/or identify problems. A quick Google search returns articles both lauding and contesting this maxim. In a Forbes article from 2014, Liz Ryan writes, "That's BS... the vast majority of important things we manage at work aren't measurable, from the quality of our new hires to the confidence we instill in a fledgling manager." She continues to explain that by focusing too much on the numbers, companies often miss out on the big picture.