Your Questions Answered: How to Love Your Service Management Platform

Brian Nye: I would say the biggest problem I’ve seen with clients wanting to implement JSM comes down to them trying to replicate the system they currently have and expecting it to do new and magical things because it’s in a new tool.

That uncomfortableness of making the change is so great that they’re not willing to open their eyes to the possibilities by making some changes that could really simplify their life.

Often, it's not a tooling issue, and I always tell people – the tool is the tool. It’s how the users are going to interact with it and that need to accept the change that comes with a new tool that is the most difficult challenge.

It comes down to the fact that they are so bought into what the old tool did that they can’t imagine a world where there’s something new and different that could provide a better path forward.

BN:That is a great question. It kind of depends on what type of changes were made. 

“Danita, in your case, you kind of saw changes or improvements relatively quickly after the project ended – would you say that?”

Danita Remspecher: “It was within four weeks that we saw a lot of improvement. More participation from our users, more requests coming in than what they were before, and utilizing the Confluence articles.”

BN: “There was an Atlassian study that I read where they were looking at some of their engagements, and it was approximately two months [before seeing efficiency gains after a JSM implementation].”

So, you’re talking about four to eight weeks before potentially seeing improvements. And a lot of that comes down to taking the time to think through how that experience is going to be for folks. That thoughtfulness will play through in the tool, because – and, this is the nice part about being infinitely flexible – things don’t have to work in one specific way. I can modify certain aspects to really help with encouraging the natural flow of work rather than saying, “Well, I have to follow this process because this is the process that’s built into the tool.”

BN: Yes, JSM works in highly regulated environments just fine depending on the type of data that’s being stored. The biggest question there is typically around whether you’re going to be able to use Atlassian’s Cloud or whether the Data Center version would be better suited depending on the type of information stored – for example, HIPAA compliance or ITAR information requirements. It is on Atlassian’s roadmap to have that available for their cloud implementations, it's just not quite there yet.

For the most part, a conversation with the compliance department to really understand what things need to be done to meet the organization’s audit needs is key, because it’s usually written in such a way that as long as we [the organization] can point back to a feature or functionality that meets the requirement, we can do it.

Is it going to be the exact way we did it in our old tool? No, but that’s where we have to say, “You know what? We are going to do it in this way.” Have them [the compliance department] come to an agreement that will work for that situation, and then move forward with it.

BN: That’s a great question. I’ll try not to say, “It depends.” There is a lot of training that Atlassian offers on Jira Service Management and whatnot, and there are different options such as virtual training courses or live training from a Partner.

There’s a lot of documentation available, and I would recommend that anyone who will use the tool watch that documentation. I will say for the training, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.

How does the tool function? In that aspect, Atlassian training does a great job. There may be some functionality that you’re building that is very specific to your type of environment. If you can watch the Atlassian documentation and get 80% of the way there, then maybe there are some very specific pieces for your organization that you want to add in.

Often, I recommend folks do a class where they present how the tool works more generally, then do a secondary hour where you just go through how you are going to implement this in your organization specifically – what does that look like? Within the tool, the buttons are going to be the same, they’re going to be in the same areas, but how you interact with customers or what your SLAs are and that sort of thing may be more dependent on your particular environment.

I would say a day is probably plenty of time – and it doesn’t have to be a full day all at once, it could be broken up over multiple days. 

For customers and support staff, training can be very simple. You could put together a quick video with very light documentation, which is better than making the assumption that they’re going to come to the tool and just know what to do because that’s not necessarily the case.

Even for people that have used Jira before, they may get frustrated when they try to make an edit to a particular ticket and don’t have the right permissions to do that because they aren’t an agent. That’s where having easy documentation that presents the rules of the road, how we’re using it [the tool], and what things we expect from you for internal folks or clients to say, “here are some quick features and functionality” can be very helpful.

When we onboard our managed service clients [at Praecipio], we typically take them through a quick slide deck that demonstrates the portal interface, the types of requests they can expect, and what it all looks like. It’s a bit more “white glove” in our situation, which may not work for everyone. It is helpful to have some kind of training plan in mind to know how you’re going to communicate your expectations when working within the tool.

BN: Off the top of my head, we’ve done quite a few HR implementations with clients. I would also say maintenance, facilities implementations is another big one – basically anywhere where someone needs to put in a request with a particular team is a good option for having Jira Service Management as a front-end piece for those teams to receive requests.

It doesn’t have to just be for your IT operations. It can be for a lot of ops folks that need to take in requests from both internal and external customers.

BN: Ticket counts comes off the top of my head…Mike, does anything come to your mind?

Mike Lyons: “Tickets deflected I think would be a good one. Customer satisfaction is another good one.”

BN: Additionally here are a few others that could be impactful:

• Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) is a key metric to know how quickly tickets are getting resolved. 
• Time to Acknowledgement can be helpful to know if we are acknowledging our customers quickly.
• Percent Breached can help you understand how many tickets have not met a particular SLA compared to the total number of tickets in that time period.

BN: Yeah, it depends. Having a good starting point is important. In Danita’s particular case, they had a bunch of knowledge articles that they were basically able to put directly into Confluence. So the time that it would take for her to stand something like that up, probably a bit quicker. 

The most important part is understanding how you’re going to organize your articles so they’re easy for agents to find when they need them. Jira Service Management does a good job of tying articles back to request types. If you’ve got pages that clearly tie back to a particular request type, you won’t have to search all of Confluence trying to find them. 

Also, formatting those articles so they’re clean when presented to the client – are you going to have diagrams? What does that look like? That way they have a good experience – so, spend a bit of extra time that you wouldn’t on other documentation for those articles that are going to be surfaced for customers so they have that good feel to them.

And Danita, is there anything you would add to that?

Danita Remspecher: “No, I mean the biggest part that took me a while was the organization. Initially we kind of just threw all the articles in, and then realized – this is blowing my mind how many we have! So then I started organizing it. And once we started that, it was much easier for us to maintain it. There’s a report that tells you how old the articles are, how many are being used, etc. Sitting down and thinking about how you want to organize and then going from there makes it much easier.”