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Case Study: Jira Service Management (DSS)
May 31, 2022
<p><a href="https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/about-data-management/databc">Data Systems and Services</a> is a highly used asset for British Columbia residents and public servants. They provide data management and sharing while advising on government data-related initiatives. Following the <a href="https://www.highwaythreesolutions.com/blog/case-study-data-services-migration-to-atlassian-cloud">successful upgrade to Atlassian Cloud</a>, the Data Systems and Services team wanted to refine and streamline their service desk for internal and external users throughout the province. They retained Highway Three Solutions in Victoria, B.C., to lead their migration from Jira software to <a href="https://www.highwaythreesolutions.com/products/jira-service-management">Jira Service Management</a> (JSM), enhanced by Atlassian forms.</p>
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<p>Designed for IT and operations teams, JSM is a purpose-built platform that bakes-in collaboration at every level. Its innovative architecture allows teams to respond to changes faster while delivering a better customer experience.</p>
<p>Atlassian forms is a dynamic form-building application <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acquires-thinktilt">recently acquired by Atlassian</a>. The powerful framework allows for no-code/low-code configurations that enable service management teams to quickly scale and adapt as needed. Atlassian forms are now fully integrated into JSM, bringing dynamic forms, validation capabilities, conditional logic, and more to JSM users. </p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">“<em>Bypass the Back-and-Forth</em>“</h3>
<p>Chris Spicer, Chapter Lead, Portfolio Owners and Scrum Masters in Data Systems and Services, Ministry of Citizens’ Services at B.C. Government explained: “In our business model, we have a number of points of connections with our clients, mostly via email. Our previous platform had too much back-and-forth via email, and this latency resulted in considerable time required for each request. JSM gives us the ability to streamline the process, getting high-value intelligence from our clients by incrementally requesting information as they make their submissions.</p>
<p>“Another benefit of moving to JSM is it gives us the ability to pivot away from the ‘favourite email contact’ – where one person receives significantly more requests than the rest of the team. JSM provides a consistent place to track conversations with clients, and they can be assigned automatically. As our people go on vacation or take positions on other teams, with JSM, the rest of the team can seamlessly connect with the clients and respond accordingly.” </p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Creative Thinking</h3>
<p>Working with an experienced team, such as Highway Three, enables the flexibility to develop creative solutions to unique workflows. </p>
<p>For the Data Systems and Services team, many inbound requests came through complicated forms, sometimes destined for up to three separate groups depending on the user-specified. This was a complex setup, and if it wasn’t handled correctly, it could result in a brittle and difficult to maintain the installation. Highway Three developed a strategy that used components instead of custom fields, providing the required flexibility while reducing the filter complexity in the work queues. An added bonus: this approach enables the team to change the forms as and when needed. Without Atlassian forms integrated with JSM, it’s unlikely that there would have been an effective alternative to solve this challenge.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Learning While Converting</h3>
<p>The Data Systems and Services team previously had an on-premise JIRA installation, using it as a pseudo-portal, so they were familiar with the Atlassian experience. The extended timeline to upgrade to JSM gave Highway Three the opportunity to create a comprehensive proof of concept environment of JSM, with a fully functional instance of <a href="https://www.highwaythreesolutions.com/products/confluence">Confluence</a>. This separate ecosystem ensured there was zero impact on their production site while providing the agents with a safe space to learn the capabilities of JSM.</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Eliminate the Ambiguity</h3>
<p>Clarity and accuracy are two of the best outcomes made possible through this upgrade. “With JSM, we have a centralized place for all client interactions,” shared Chris. “This enables us to reduce the time it takes to get the request to the correct team and track tickets as they’re completed, and it helps us route internally, so the client doesn’t have to worry about getting the request to the right team. The client does not need to know how we’re organized to get their request to the right place. The logic in JSM drives that request into the appropriate team’s queue. We’re looking forward to seeing how this improves our ability to be responsive to our clients’ requests.”</p>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Measurable Results</h3>
<p>Now that the Data Systems and Services portal is in beta, the group has instant access to real-time analytics to measure their performance and workload, including the ability to see the ratio of tickets created vs. resolved, their time to resolution, and even how long a request has to wait for a third-party resolution. With the new platform, they can see how many users viewed the knowledge base in Confluence and successfully found the information they required (preventing a ticket from being created) and the overall workload for individual agents as well as for all groups. While the group does not have any Service-Level Agreements (SLA) in place at this time, they’re fully equipped to manage and report on their success should the need arise.</p>
<p><strong>For organizations and institutions with internal or external — or a combination of both — requests, the Jira Service Management portal is a smart way to improve the quality and capacity of your service architecture. </strong></p>
<p><strong>If JSM sounds like the right fit for your team, contact Highway Three Solutions in Victoria to set up a 7-day free trial of the Standard or Premium plan.</strong></p>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Challenges:</h3>
<ul><li>Substantial time and resources required to quantify activities </li><li>Categorizing requests for a busy help centre (7-8 teams across two help centres)</li><li>Low-quality requests</li><li>Integrating incoming requests to software development teams</li></ul>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Solutions:</h3>
<ul><li>JSM + Atlassian forms allowed all requests to be made online – even requests previously made offline between agents</li><li>Streamlined workflows with components vs. customizable fields</li><li>Conditional logic, configurable styling, and appropriate fields through Atlassian forms</li><li>Synchronization via Automation to ensure JSM tasks can be assigned to sprints</li></ul>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Results:</h3>
<ul><li>With the current setup, the Data Systems and Service steam can now quickly and accurately determine how many requests they have, how many they’ve solved, and where each request is currently at in the current workflow.</li><li>Inbound requests are directed to the appropriate group quickly and easily.</li><li>The powerful form builder, augmented by the JSM capabilities, guides users through the workflow, resulting in better-quality requests that are automatically sent to the relevant teams.</li></ul>
