Best practices for IT teams using Jira Service Desk
Overview
Many IT organizations use ITIL as the standard for running their IT organization. ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is the gold standard for IT organizations worldwide because it provides a framework for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. The goal of ITIL is to improve how IT delivers and supports business services. ITIL is not just technology management or process management, it also focuses on improving the capabilities of people, processes, and technology while delivering value to an organization.
Adopting ITIL is a journey that takes time and commitment.
Jira Service Desk offers IT teams a streamlined approach for adopting ITIL in a way that best fits the needs of their IT organization. You can easily adapt Jira Service Desk to meet your ITIL requirements without compromising the ease of use your IT team expects. The IT project template pre-packages the setup for service requests, incident management, problem management and change management, but we suggest that you treat the implementation with an agile flavor:
- Start with defining the most common and urgent types of work that need to be tracked in Jira Service Desk and implement those first.
- Roll them out, provide value to the business, and gather feedback.
- After that, continue building upon the existing configuration and refine the setup.
Set up a project
Let's create a new IT Service Desk project with the IT template.
- Sign into Jira Service Desk as an administrator.
- Select Projects > Create Project.
- Choose the IT Service Desk template and select Next.
- Name your project. Jira Service Desk uses your name to generate a project key. This project key is the first part of the unique ID for each of the issue in your project. The following example uses the key ITSAMPLE.
- Select Submit. You will land in a service desk similar to the following:
- Optional: If you're new to Jira Service Desk, have a look at Getting started with Jira Service Desk.
Tour the project
Now let's get familiar with the default setup for service requests, incidents, problems, and change.
- Have a look at the customer portal. It shows the request types defined in the template. Request types are a lightweight way to set up a service catalog in Jira Service Desk.
- In the sidebar, go to the Project settings link at the bottom. You will see the request types that you saw on the customer portal in the last step.
Each request type is associated with an issue type, and Jira Service Desk defines four different issue types for the four processes. Find the Issue types section in the settings and you'll see Change, Incident, Problem, and Service Request. For more information, see Setting up request types.
- Review the default workflows for each process. For example, the following screenshot shows the workflow for service requests. You will also be able to see the fields used by each process.
Create service requests, incidents, problem, and change records
There are multiple channels available for the creation of those records:
- Opening service requests: Your customers can raise service requests via the customer portal or email. For ITIL-based recommendations, see Service request fulfillment.
Opening a service request in the customer portal Reporting incidents: Incidents can be reported from different sources, via the customer portal, email, or system alerts with the REST API. Again, in Jira terminology, every incident record is tracked as an issue. When an incident is reported, it's allocated a distinct identifier called an issue key.
Reporting an incident in the customer portal
Requesting changes: Similarly, you can create change requests via the customer portal, email, or programmatically with the REST API.
Requesting change in the customer portalCreating problem records: Typically, problems are not created by customers and that's why the default setup doesn't include any problem request types on the customer portal. Agents can generate a problem from within Jira by clicking Create and selecting the Problem issue type.
Track changes and keep your team in the loop
Jira Service Desk automatically tracks all the changes to an issue with date and time stamps, and these details are visible in the Activity and History tabs of the issue. Email notifications are sent to the people involved in an incident and an administrator can configure these notifications for their processes. For information about this, check out Configuring service desk notifications.
The power of Confluence knowledge base
Customers like to self-service these days, and your agents need to be able to find known errors, work-arounds, temporary fixes and routine fixes quickly and efficiently. You can achieve both of these goals by linking Jira Service Desk with a Confluence knowledge base space. For information, see Serving customers with a knowledge base.
Success! Time to customize
Each IT or service team is unique, and the default workflows, fields, request types, and queues are a starting point for you to build your own. Refer to the setup information for instructions: Administering service desk projects.
The following pages provide information about each process, including a sample workflow diagram based on the ITIL framework. Feel free to refer to these samples as you set up your own: