Best practices for IT teams using Jira Service Management
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework for ITSM (IT service management). ITIL recommendations have been an industry standard for 20 years. Adopting these practices takes time. You can seek formal training on how to make ITIL recommendations work best for your business.
If you're interested in more general information about ITSM or other guides, check out our ITSM resources.
We recommend starting with processes that are essential to your business goals. Jira Service Management provides workflows for IT teams in our IT Service Management project template. We created the following ITIL workflow add-ons, available in the Atlassian Marketplace:
- Change management for Jira Service Management
- Jira Service Management incident management
- Problem management for Jira Service Management
- Service requests for Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management is configurable. We recommend you start with an ITIL framework and then adjust to your specific business needs.
What follows is an overview of some best practices for your IT service desk. This guide covers:
- Fulfilling service requests with your IT service desk
- Managing changes with your IT service project
- Managing incidents with your IT service desk
- Managing problems with your IT service desk
- Calculating priority automatically
Use the IT Service Management template
Only Jira administrators can create projects.
To create a project using the IT Service Desk template:
- Select Projects > Create Project.
- Choose the IT Service Management template and select Next.
- Name your project.
- Select Submit.
Provide a robust service catalog
Using simple forms, your customers can do a lot of the early leg work for your service project. Jira Service Management provides them with clear and concise options for requesting help. A robust service catalog makes sure that service requests are prioritized and get to the correct service agent. And, your agents get the information needed to fulfill the request before beginning work.
The IT Service Management template comes with a service catalog of common requests. We call these forms "request types" and you can customize them to suit your needs.
To start, identify the most common and urgent IT tasks for your service project. Doublecheck that there's a corresponding request type for each of these.
Go to Project settings > Request types to view or edit your service catalog. The entries there appear in your customer portal. Read more about request types.
Help your customers serve themselves with a knowledge base
Mature IT service desks solve common problems without ever seeing a ticket. We recommend providing your customers a knowledge base.
Link your Jira Service Management site to a Confluence knowledge base. Keep a record of known solutions and two important things happen:
- Your customers find and view relevant articles when they search the customer portal. They may find the answers they need without ever raising a request.
- Your service agents can find relevant articles when working on issues. This saves them time hunting down answers or workarounds to common IT requests.
Learn more at Set up a knowledge base for self-service.
Start with ITIL recommended workflows and adapt to your needs
ITIL recommendations are a framework, a set of ITSM best practices meant for you to adapt from and grow.
In Jira Service Management, we associate your service catalog with workflows by assigning a request type to an underlying issue type. Our recommendations for IT teams use four ITIL-inspired workflows. To learn more about how these issue types and workflows work to streamline your service project, check out our guides for handling:
- Fulfilling service requests with your IT service desk
- Managing changes with your IT service project
- Managing incidents with your IT service desk
- Managing problems with your IT service desk
- Calculating priority automatically
These allow you to have many customer request forms that follow the same workflow. For example, new hardware requests and password resets use the same service request workflow.
Our default workflows make your service project effective, out of the box. You can customize them as you go, scaling to the needs of your business.