Building a successful Jira Service Desk requires a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult to find the perfect balance between ease of use for your agents (those who work on requests) and your customers (those who submit requests). One of the most important ways of achieving that balance is to create a great Confluence Knowledge Base (KB). If your articles are relevant, concise, and easy-to-navigate, your customers can avoid submitting a request, giving time back to both the customer and agent. Below are some common mistakes to avoid as you work towards creating your ideal Confluence Knowledge Base that is a reliable, single source of truth for your agents and customers.

Don't Put Your KB Articles in a Space Used for Internal Documentation/Non-Service Desk Related Content

If you create KB articles in a Space where non-service desk related pages already live, confusing or unwanted information may appear when customers search for help. This may push your customer away from reading the content and make their overall experience less enjoyable. Compiling your Knowledge Base articles in their own separate space is key to ensuring the most relevant articles show up when the customer uses the Service Desk. If you need to centralize documentation for both agents and customers alike, leverage page restrictions in the Space to allow for internal and external content.

Don't Create Lengthy Articles Using Technical Terms

When writing articles for customers, it's important to keep them top of mind. The customer may not understand the technical or team-related verbiage your agents typically use. It can feel daunting for them to look at a wordy article, so we suggest using bullet points, numbered lists, and mixed media (images, videos, etc.) to break up the content. Applying screenshots to your articles can also be useful, as it provides the user with a visual guide on out troubleshoot the issue on their own.

Don't Create Every Single Article From Scratch

Although they may not be useful for all of your articles, Confluence has built-in templates available for you to use when creating most of the content in your Knowledge Base. There are templates specifically for Troubleshooting articles and for How-To articles that have handy macros and formatting already incorporated. You can even customize these templates to better meet the needs of your users. If the out-of-the-box Blueprints aren't the right fit for your requirements, you can create custom templates (although you won't be able to create them from the Jira issue directly in the same way), which will save your agents time when creating articles and allow for a consistent user experience when navigating through the KB. 

Don't Ignore Reports on the Usefulness of your Articles

Jira has several native reports that allow you to see how your Knowledge Base articles are performing. The Requests Deflected report illustrates how often your customers find articles useful. This report shows deflected requested and how often articles are viewed in the portal. The Requests Resolved report displays the number of requests that have been resolved with an article, those that were resolved without an article, and requests deflected in the portal. These reports are key for determining which articles are beneficial to your customers, which allows you to tailor your content to meet customer needs.

Now that you know what not to do when building your Confluence Knowledge Base, explore how Praecipio Consulting has answered other Service Desk questions, like How does Jira Service work with ITIL? or Can you really set up an ITIL-based Service Desk in 3 weeks?

What is ITIL? The Five Stages of ITIL

As a process consultant for a Platinum Atlassian Solution Partner, my responsibilities include helping our customers set up their ITSM solutions and providing guidance in-line with best practices and industry standards. The ITIL framework has been accepted as a collection of best practices for ITSM and the ITIL processes are designed in a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle with the end goal being continual improvement. The Five Stages of ITIL are as follows:

Stage 1: Service Strategy - Understanding customer needs and determining which services and capabilities will provide the most value

Stage 2: Service Design - Designing new services or changes and improvements to existing services 

Stage 3: Service Transition - Coordinated effort to build and deploy services

Stage 4: Service Operation - Fulfilling requests, fixing problems and performing maintenance tasks

Stage 5: Continual Service Improvement - Capturing lessons from successes and failures and incorporating those learnings in the process

Getting Started with ITIL and the Atlassian Suite 

Based on the Five Stages of ITIL, I'll walk through how the Atlassian suite of products can help you and your company continuously improve your ITSM offerings.

Stage 1: Service Strategy - Confluence and Jira 

In the strategy phase, you are gathering market research and determining customer needs. Confluence is a great place to document these ideas and requirements. When integrated with Jira, you will be able to create a Jira issue for each requirement from the Confluence page.

Stage 2: Service Design - Confluence

In the service design phase, you are determining the services and service levels based on the decisions made in the strategy phase. You will want to document these design decisions in Confluence. Confluence also has built in diagram capabilities for modeling processes.

Stage 3: Service Transition - Jira and Jira Service Desk

In the service transition phase, you will use Jira to track the work on the requirements while you build the services in Jira Service Desk. Jira Service Desk will allow you to create different services, workflows, permissions, SLAs and automations. You can also customize the portal and what the customers see.

Stage 4: Service Operation - Jira Service Desk and Confluence

In the service operation phase, you will use Jira Service Desk queues to manage requests and you can communicate with customers through the Jira Service Desk tickets. Confluence will be used to document fixes and how-to articles. Customers will also have access to Confluence's Knowledge Base – as a way to identify or resolve in a self-service manner.

Stage 5: Continual Service Improvement - Jira Service Desk and Confluence

In the continual service improvement phase, you will use Jira Service Desk's satisfaction surveys and documented lessons learned in Confluence to help determine how to improve services. 

After all of this - Rinse and repeat.

Building an ITSM Solution

By utilizing the Atlassian tools, you have many of the recommended capabilities to create a great ITSM solution that is continuously improving. If you don't have the time, resources, or experience to do this yourself – Praecipio Consulting offers an ITSM QuickStart that can set you up with many of these recommended practices (in a fraction of the time it would normally take to design and develop your own ITSM solution). To learn more about the ITSM QuickStart or other services please visit https://www.praecipio.com/itsm-consulting. 

Atlassian, the developer of Jira, has a wide variety of products. If you're here, you're probably wondering about a few specifically:

• Jira Software
• Jira Service Desk
• Jira Core

Particularly, what the heck is the difference between them? Which is better/ Which do I need to use? Can I use more than one? Take a look to learn more about each Atlassian Jira product and discover which tool makes sense for your team. 

Jira Software

When you're thinking of Jira, it's most likely you're thinking of Jira Software, Atlassian's biggest Jira (and oldest) product. If you're a user in a Jira Software Instance you can:

• Work in Software projects
• View issues in kanban or scrum boards
• Run sprints
• Track releases

If you're developing code or are running your teams in an Agile way, Jira Software is likely for you. 

Jira Service Desk

Jira Service Desk, on the other hand, is Atlassian's answer to ITSM (IT Service Management) —it gives you customer portals and the ability to allow unlicensed users to submit tickets to your team. 

If you're working as an agent in a Jira Service Desk instance you can:

• Work in Service Desk projects
• Work on tickets submitted through a customizable customer portal
• View issues in queues
• Track Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

If your team manages request intake (internal or external) and are tracking SLAs or service requests, Jira Service Desk may be your answer.

Jira Service Desk is ITIL certified, but any team can use it. For more information on this, watch this Webinar to hear how non-technical teams can use Atlassian.

Jira Core

Jira Core is Atlassian's business team offering. If you want to track projects without too many bells and whistles, Jira Core and its "Business" projects will get you there. 

With Jira Core any team can do things like:

• Manage projects or campaigns
• Track assets
• Anything that requires moving work through a workflow

Jira Core ships with both Jira Software and Jira Service Desk, so if your organization has either already, then you can try out a business project today. 

So what do I do now?

Any Jira instance can have any combination of these three products, which makes it very easy to cover multiple parts of your organization.

Each offering brings a number of ways to make Jira work for you and your team, and each type of instance lets you customize everything from permissions to specialized workflows to better fit your organization. 

Now that you've got that figured out, contact Praecipio Consulting to help with your licensing needs or to simply help you get started.

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.

Putting out Smoldering tickets

Many workflows offer customers a chance to review the ticket before closing. But, replying to the work request isn't always the top priority of the customer, which in turn, leaves the ticket to smolder in an almost done state. Instead, Jira Service Desk can help you do a fully extinguish the request by doing a couple of things, messaging the customer on impending closure and auto closing the ticket with no response. Just follow these steps below.

Step 1: Create SLAs

While this may seem odd, SLAs can be used for more than just metrics, they are a great trigger for automations due to the extended functionality SLAs bring in Jira Service Desk. Start by creating two SLAs, call them Time in Resolved - Customer Notification and Time in Resolved. Set Time in Resolved - Customer Notification to the parameters shown in the screenshot below. Note, the SLA time can be changed depending on the amount of time you want to elapse before notifying the customer that their ticket will be closed. The SLA for Time in Resolved will have the same start and stop conditions, but put the goal time to be more than the goal of the notification trigger (for example, if the notification is set to send 120 hours after entering the status, than set the goal for the auto close to be 168 hours as this will give 48 hours for the customer to respond).

Step 2: Create Jira Service Desk Automations

Great, now that these SLAs are in place, let's use them to trigger Jira Service Desk Automations.  

Step 2a: Time in Resolved - Customer Notification

For this Automation, you will want to set the When to trigger off of the Time in Resolved - Customer Notification SLA when the SLA has been breached. Feel free to add an optional If statement should there be situations in which the SLA should not be executed. Lastly use the Public Comment option for the Then statement to send a message that the customer will receive. Included is a screenshot of this automation.

Step 2b: Auto Close Resolved Ticket

For this Automation, you will want to set the When to trigger off of the Time in Resolved SLA when the SLA has been breached. Feel free to add an optional If statement should there be situations in which the SLA should not be executed. Lastly use the Transition Issue option for the Then statement to move the issue to the final status. Note that it is best to use a hidden transition which does not require any fields or info as this is done through an automation. Included is a screenshot of this automation.

Step 3: Find other small fires to put out using automations

This is just one example of how automations can be used to keep customers engaged on the ticket and closing out issues that have been resolved. This same logic can be applied to many different areas in Jira Service Desk and can keep your front line firefighters focused on the hot spots and less time doing clean up!

If you still want to learn more about Jira Service Desk automations in action, join us for our next webinar on September 12, 11 a.m. CST: Automation with Jira Service Desk.

Once organizations make the decision to adopt Jira Service Desk, they often choose one of two implementation options: they either do it themselves or engage a consultancy for a custom implementation—neither of which is ideal for any but the largest enterprises. Few organizations have the skillsets to do the work in-house, and a custom implementation can be both pricey and time-consuming. Fortunately, there’s a third option: An Accelerator implementation by Praecipio Consulting.

There are distinct differences between a traditional Jira Service Desk implementation and an Accelerator implementation by Praecipio Consulting. To choose the best implementation method for your organization, it’s important to understand how the options differ as well as your organization’s requirements.

Let’s look first at a traditional implementation. Because of the scope of a Jira Service Desk implementation, an experienced consulting firm will work iteratively to ensure your satisfaction throughout the process. The consultant(s) will meet with your stakeholders daily to gather requirements and demonstrate the previous day’s deliverables. With the right consulting firm, this process will result in a top-notch Jira Service Desk deployment that meets your exact needs. However, the deployment will take several months.

A traditional implementation is ideal if your organization requires:

• Multiple, complex workflows
• Heavily customized workflows
• Heavily customized interface
• Flexibility

A Accelerator implementation is also performed in an iterative manner. However, the scope of the project is much smaller. Instead of building out complex custom workflows, the project provides prescribed configurations based on ITIL best practices. Our team applies its extensive experience to build out industry standard workflows with improvements that we’ve identified over the past decade. As a result, we deliver a Jira Service Desk implementation in just three weeks with workflows that are a step above the textbook recommendation.

An Accelerator implementation is ideal if your organization requires:

• Rapid delivery
• Basic workflows such as service request, change management, and incident management
• Minimal time spent configuring using prescribed methods and schemes
• Deployment based on industry best practices
• A solid foundation for future growth and/or customization

The bottom line: An Accelerator implementation allows you to trade customization for speed of delivery and cost. Many small and mid-sized organizations make this trade willingly as they have little need for heavy customizations. If this sounds like you—or even if it doesn’t—our consultants would be happy to discuss our implementation options with you. Check out praecipio.com to learn more about our Accelerator options and other ITSM resources.

Over the years, Praecipio Consulting has developed and implemented service desk solutions for a range of clients using Jira's powerful out-of-the-box capabilities and a few key add-ons; however, there was always something missing. When Jira Service Desk was first introduced, we were excited to see Atlassian embracing their customer (and partner) feedback. Over the few short years it has been in the market, Jira Service Desk has revolutionized the way teams serve their customers both internal and external. If you couldn't tell, we're in love with Jira Service Desk. Here are five things to make you fall in love with it too. 

Customer Portals make requesting help easy

Jira Service Desk provides customer-friendly portals to assist your customers in creating Requests. The portal can be configured to speak your customer's language while providing Agents pre-set information describing the customers' issues. Give your request types custom names and icons while mapping them to existing Jira issues. Add your company's branding, color schemes, and flair to personalize your Portals. These customizations look great and are a great way to automatically triage and resolve your customers' requests.

Approval tracking and visibility

Visibility is key when it comes to approvals. By assigning an Approver to an issue, Agents can see who needs to approve Requests at each step. Approvers will be listed on the Agent view as well as the Portal along with the details of what they're approving. Once the Request has been approved, this decision will be recorded with the ticket and can be referenced at any point during the lifecycle of the work. This helps everyone keep track of the official stamp of approval.

Handy Automation

Jira Service Desk has many out-of-the-box automations to trigger different steps in your workflows. Using automation to facilitate interaction between Customers and Agents stops support Requests from getting lost. Since a Request can almost always be 'Waiting on Customer' or 'Waiting on Support', you can use automation to transition between these two statuses when someone comments on the Request. When the ticket is 'Waiting on Support' and the support team asks a question in a comment, this Request can automatically move to 'Waiting on Customer'. Never worry about tickets being forgotten again! If you don't see what you need, create a custom automation rule using simple When, If, Else, Then logic to automate everything from a Notification to a Workflow Transition. 

SLAs that work for you

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should help increase visibility into how a team can best work together, not something that adds pressure to situations outside of your control. Configure SLAs so that they are paused when a ticket is 'Waiting on Customer' or 'Blocked'. This lets you understand how your team is working while measuring performance in a fair, practical way. Using Jira Query Language (JQL), tune your SLAs to a specific Customer, Request type, even Priority or Severity to ensure your team meets or exceeds your Customer agreements. 

Confluence Knowledge-Base Integration

Integrate your Confluence knowledge base to help your customers fix their problems before they're submitted to the team. While a customer is typing in a request name, Confluence uses SmartGraph (tm) to suggest articles that relate to the request. The suggestions could be articles with similar words in the title or articles that other Customers have clicked on while submitting similar requests. Customers can self-serve and ultimately finish what might have gone through the entire support process. This saves the support team time and helps the customer get their problem fixed right away.

While there are many more reasons we love Jira Service Desk, these five things make us here at Praecipio Consulting fall in love with it even more every day. If you haven't experienced this for yourself, contact us for a demo or visit our collection of ITSM with Jira Service Desk Webinars here. We're more than happy to share the love. 

Growth Through Change 

"Organizations that do not or cannot evolve will not last." In the business world, change is constant and necessary, especially when it comes to meeting the dynamic needs of customers. ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a methodology that helps organizations effectively manage change while putting the customer at the center of the process. ITIL prescribes processes to ensure the customer's needs and requests are handled with ease – from acknowledgement of an issue through the application and evaluation of the solution. One of the greatest values of the ITIL methodology is that it embeds continual improvement into the process. The ITIL framework can be leveraged by anyone, including non-technical teams, to better manage change and serve customers. Atlassian's fastest growing product, Jira Service Desk, facilitates ITIL adoption in an organization by encouraging traceability, collaboration, and reporting. 

As business process experts certified in ITIL, we leverage the ITIL methodology in unison with Jira Service Desk to institute best practices for our clients. Here are 5 real-world examples of how Praecipio Consulting helped our clients implement lasting organizational change by embracing key ITIL concepts of automation, visibility, knowledge base, change management and evaluation, and continuous improvement. 

Automation

"Using service automation to streamline both simple and more complex workflows of course impacts the overall efficiency of the organization... it also allows for a much better end-user experience for everyone at the company." - ITIL beyond IT: What is Service Automation & Service Relationship Management?

Problem: A major utility company powering the U.S. Eastern seaboard was manually reporting security equipment issues and coordinating with external vendors to fix the issues. This manual process was prone to errors and didn't allow for tracking of service level agreements (SLAs), which would determine which vendors were breaching their contracts. The company was using spreadsheets to track these crucial assets and their maintenance. The spreadsheet system was inefficient and created duplicate versions – leading to confusion, frustration, and waste. Furthermore, the spreadsheets could not track SLAs for Acknowledgement or Resolution for vendors.

Solution: To reduce redundancy and enforce SLAs, our experts implemented Jira Service Desk for the major utility company. By replacing their spreadsheets with Jira Core and Jira Service Desk, we helped them add a level of automation to their workflow. This reduced waste of time and resources, allowed for better communication with third-party vendors, and created a clear path for escalation. The custom configuration we created for the company maintained their security, while also allowing vendors to be a part of of the conversation. Furthermore, reporting features from both Jira Core and Jira Service Desk allowed for a central point of truth. The utility company could check the status of service tickets and see how well vendors were adhering to their SLAs. Through the process of improving their security equipment reporting and vendor coordination, the company found other areas of improvement and have chosen to continue working with us to maximize those workflows. 

Visibility

"It can be very difficult to know the health of your service desk, run reports, and find way to improve your support if you don’t have the right data." - The ABCs of Jira Service Desk: measuring success

Problem: A major U.S. waste management company wanted to adopt a more structured reporting system, replace an old enterprise software application, and incorporate the ITIL framework into their organization. The company's goal was to standardize tools in order to improve communication and rally around a consistent project management methodology. The waste management company desired a suite of tools with the ability to integrate functions across IT service areas, leading to better service for the end customer.

Solution: In addition to implementing several other Atlassian products, our experts helped the company leverage Jira Service Desk to achieve their business goals. We helped them create a central application with the ability to distinguish request types through a structured workflow. This included a more robust user interface to better triage issues and send them to the appropriate teams. The ability to categorize requests and label them with levels of urgency allowed the company to have better reporting, leading to improved enforcements of SLAs. 

Knowledge Base

"[A knowledge base] gets [customers] the help they need at the speed they’ve become accustomed to – i.e., in the time it takes to swipe around on their phones – and it frees service desk agents from stressing out while anxious customers wait on hold or answering the same question over email for the 10th time this week." - 4 tips for getting started with knowledge management

Problem: A large, private U.S. university wanted to revamp an old software application and replace it with a more robust and dynamic knowledge base. The university's goal was to increase usability for both their students and faculty regarding technical and campus-related questions, deflecting tickets by providing requesters with FAQ's and other resources to help them self-serve to find their answers. 

Solution: Our experts helped the university leverage Jira Service Desk and Confluence to achieve their goal. Combining Jira Service Desk with Questions for Confluence (a Confluence add-on that provides a knowledge base inside the already powerful wiki tool) allowed the university to implement a centralized knowledge database. Jira Service Desk allowed for better help engagement using queues and other helpful functionalities. Questions for Confluence empowered external users to help themselves by accessing a database of pre-answered questions, without tying up service desk agents with redundant problems.

Change Management and Evaluation

"Listening to your customers is the single most important thing you can do for the health of your company." - 5 tips to transform your IT team from zero to superhero

Problem: The largest provider of support services to general and multi-specialty dental groups in the United States needed the ability to receive and respond to client feedback in addition to handling client issues. They did not have a clearly defined process for patients to interact with the organization and to raise issues. Their marketing team was searching for a new software tool that would manage feedback in a way that led to issue resolution and change management. The team's ideal tool would be able to enforce and report on multiple SLAs through issues submitted via the company's public website.

Solution: Our experts helped the dental corporation adopt Jira Core and Jira Service Desk to manage issue tracking and change management. With Jira Service Desk, the company was able to cleanly sort through client feedback and create a workflow to address issues that arose. Beyond managing client feedback, the dental corporation also used these tools for clinical tasks, billing, and other activities that needed life cycle tracking. In addition to tracking, the Atlassian tools helped the organization evaluate the effectiveness of their changes and quantified the improvements made – empowering all teams, not just marketing, to better serve their customers. 

Continuous Improvement

"With a single-product approach, configuring an SLA or modifying a workflow is easy, because they share core processes." How Jira Service Desk approaches ITSM 

Problem: A major U.S. insurance company was using three different software applications for code management, issue tracking, and service desk management – leading to inefficiencies and miscommunication. Their use of three separate applications resulted in duplicate tickets and the inability to enforce SLAs across the organization.The insurance company wanted to improve these processes and embrace ITIL's practice of continuous improvement. 

Solution: Our assessment encouraged the company to adopt a single application, Jira Service Desk, to provide a single source of truth. With Jira Service Desk, there was a common point of collaboration for issue management. This reduced duplicate tickets and saved valuable time and resources. Leveraging entities, workflows, and issue linking, we helped the insurance company align their processes to make reporting and enforcing SLAs easier, more efficient, and more effective. By strengthening their ability to track what changes are needed and to act upon those needs, we helped them develop a cycle for continuous improvement.  

ITIL for One, and ITIL for All 

"Just because one service desk streamlines the IT and service departments, it doesn’t mean that other teams can’t also benefit from them." - 5 tips to transform your IT team from zero to superhero

These real-world examples from our clients highlight how ITIL and Jira Service Desk can help organizations evolve and change – without the growing pains. ITIL concepts of automation, visibility, knowledge base, change management and evaluation, and continuous improvement aren't just for IT teams. These powerful ideas also provides immense value to other parts of any organization, technical and business teams alike. At Praecipio Consulting, we excel at leveraging the ITIL methodology and Jira Service Desk to help organizations do what they do better. Want more proof? Contact us to learn how we can help your organization evolve and do your best business. 

The best teams sync with each other. Think of the intangible magic conjured by the Championship-sweeping Chicago Bulls of the 90's, helmed by Michael Jordan. They ran their offense to perfection, playing to the strengths of each team member and executing each step in perfect rhythm to put points on the board. Any member of those teams will tell you their success came not only from having high-performing people but from working together within an established offense, or process. Because they bought in and trusted the process, each team member knew his responsibility at all times. The team ran time-tested methodologies for getting the win, adjusting as needed after analyzing the other team's strategy. Basketball is all about strategy, process, and teamwork.

Now think of that team that loses to the Bulls- that loses to everyone. The team that's always scrambling after a broken play, unsure of how to set up their offense or what to do after a missed basket. They spend the entire game – and all their focus and energy – trying to just keep up. These are the teams that don't trust in their process, usually because it hasn't worked in the past or they haven't learned how to work with each other. It's hard for each player to handle his responsibilities because he feels like he has to win the game by himself instead of together with his teammates. It's not a good way to win games, and it's certainly not a good way to structure your IT team.

As Atlassian Platinum Enterprise partners and experts in all things process, we've got your playbook for all-star incident management:

Top 3 Tips for Championship ITSM

      1. Track your failures for greater success.

Basketball teams use stats to identify strengths and root out weaknesses. Tracking areas for improvement is key. When agents solve issues in silos they can't tell when an issue reoccurs or causes other issues, indicating a root cause that should be investigated. Ability to link issues is paramount to give your problem-solvers visibility into what keeps going wrong and, ultimately, what should be changed to keep it from happening again. 

2. Success loves preparation.

The 90's Bulls probably lost count of how many times they ran the same plays during practice. The better we prepare, the more successful we are. In the IT world, reporting, documentation, analytics, and other functionalities of our ITSM tool of choice make it easier to prepare well. When we're able to forecast issues based on prior knowledge, we're prepared for what's ahead. Data like a team's sprint velocity or average resource allocation per type of project inform planning for all foreseeable project outcomes.

3. Establish repeatable processes.

Michael Jordan is one of the most successful athletes in history because he was the first one in the gym and the last one out. He was always running drills and perfecting his shot, establishing repeatable processes that became muscle memory. Applying this concept to your organization allows your team to handle day to day operations with relative ease - each agent knows what to do, and they trust in the established process. This is a key to effective incident management and it allows you to focus on improving and advancing solutions rather than fighting fires.

Seen It, Solved It: Major U.S. Insurance Provider

Ready to see these plays in action? Here's how these 3 tips helped our client do better work, faster.

THE PROBLEM

Issues are like potato chips: you never have just one. In a business, any single issue that arises is usually experienced by multiple end-users and often starts a domino effect that causes more related issues. Without the ability to see across all these related issues, each agent responding to an individual issue only sees just that, failing to see the forest for the trees and moving on with an issue fix that doesn't address the root cause.

A major U.S. insurance provider came to us with concerns about their incident management. They already knew that their processes were poorly designed and not well adhered to, but they needed help figuring out how to improve them. In particular, incidents were not well documented or properly managed, putting them at risk for violating regulatory compliances. The client's struggles included:

• ITSM Processes with No Buy-In (Too complex, too outdated, or too redundant)

• Lack of Integration Across Tools (Lots of time wasted in context switching, Inability to analyze across platforms)

• No SLAs or Metrics to Gauge Effectiveness

In short: They were focusing all their time and resources trying to just keep up, but could never get ahead in the game.

THE GAME CHANGER

Enter Coach Praecipio Consulting and Jira Service Desk to deliver a slam dunk incident management solution.

New Process Playbook

Because our client had different tools for managing incidents, their lack of visibility across platforms led to slow speed to market with fixes. Jira Service Desk not only solves this issue, but also supports best practices for incident management. By standardizing automated workflows and establishing lean processes, our client is no longer burdened by redundancies and can gather meaningful metrics across incidents.

Pass to other Players, er... Tools

In order to deflect the amount of incoming tickets, Jira Service Desk integrates with Confluence to provide a self-serve knowledge base. By leveraging this integration, our client gets back time and resources, no longer tied up on tickets to which an answer already exists. Leveraging machine-learning, the Confluence knowledge base identifies frequently searched topics and strengthens its query language to provide the best answers to questions around incidents. 

Set the Shot Clock

As an insurance provider, our client needed to ensure that they stayed within regulatory compliance with vendors and customers alike. Configuring SLAs in Jira Service Desk allows for the client to start the timer the minute a ticket is assigned, tracking time to resolution and producing reports to identify SLAs in danger of being breached. By doing this, the client gains visibility into incident management and can use metrics against goals for continuous improvement. 

Be Like Mike

Like the Bulls' 1-2 punch of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, the tandem of Jira Service Desk and experience-driven process expertise gives our clients a heightened ability to execute ITSM best practices and keep their teams in a cycle of continual improvement. Maximizing your processes makes your day-to-day work simpler, allows you to focus on higher level objectives for better business, and helps you get numbers on the board (with dollar signs in front!). 

Practice makes perfect- it also makes money. Michael Jordan and his teammates knew it, and the best IT teams in the world know it. Take your team's performance to championship levels with the right processes and the right tools- and, if you need help, think of Praecipio Consulting as your coach with a lot of championship experience. 

About Sam Besozzi

Sam is a Consultant at Praecipio Consulting where he delivers expert solutions to our top clients. He has an extensive background in process improvement and design and draws heavily from Six Sigma, Lean, and other efficiency-focused models. As a new Austin, TX transplant (originally from Ohio), Sam enjoys exploring his new hometown, hiking, and searching for the perfect taco.