Jira Align vs. ServiceNow IT Service Management

The Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools help keep our scrum teams moving in the right direction. It gives Sr. Executives visibility into the progress of our digital transformation efforts. It provides information to our program manager to create the necessary artifacts to justify continued funding of our initiatives. It also supports the SAFe framework, along with some others. And the Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools provide integration to other tools that we use in our portfolio.

Incentivized

In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.

• Effective Sprint planning : Sprint planning can be done using Planning Poker in AgileCraft by clicking Team > Manage > Other > Estimation Games very effectively for distributed teams.
• Team Capacity Allocation Report: After tasks are created at team or program level, the report from AgileCraft cab be pulled and can be verified that no team member is under or over allocated. A report can be generated by navigating to Team > Manage > Assign Tasks.
• Effective Requirement trace-ability: To maintain requirements trace-ability follow the steps below:
• Upload test cases against the story/requirement. once uploaded test cases will be visible under that story
• Execute Test cases in AgileCraft and mark them as Pass/Fail based on the actual outcome
• Based on test results, The acceptance criterion's can be marked as “Pass” or “Fail” & if marked failed corresponding defect can be logged & can be attached with the story
• So against each story we can easily see whether all test cases been executed or not & which acceptance criterion's are failed & how many defects are in open or close state.
• Daily Scrum: In AgileCraft, the option to run a daily stand-up is available from Team > Manage > Daily Standups. Selecting the sprint number opens the daily stand-up meeting window in which each team member's tasks are visible and hours can be burned against them. Conduct Scrum meetings in AgileCraft, and burn each associate hour against the tasks created during the meeting. The burn-down chart can be generated & viewed during the stand-up to check whether the team is on track.

Incentivized

• When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
• I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
• Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
• To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.

Incentivized

• The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
• The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
• The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.

Incentivized

• It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
• The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
• The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!

Incentivized

There is nothing that can be better than Jira but it needs to keep improving certain areas especially the attachment size area.

Incentivized

To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.

As I have mentioned, some older, less tech savvy, team members have not found it as intuitive. I found it the same when I started using it although it quickly made sense. I think this is because there are lots of features we do not use so this can get in the way of what we do use

Incentivized

The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.

We have never had any issues with ServiceNow's availability that I am aware of in the two years I have been using it.

Incentivized

For a massive system, page loads are reasonably quick, including searches.

Incentivized

Overall support from Jira team is good. It comes at an additional price but it is very efficient. There are no long wait times, you get a dedicated team to look into your issues. The support is available throughout the year and they keep a record of your issues. Overall we are very satisfied with the support they have provided us over the years, it has been very effective for the price that we pay.

Incentivized

I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.

Incentivized

To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.

Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure Devops won't have the major functionality of software management like Jira. The customization provided by Jira is having a cutting edge over any project management tool. Adds-on and Plugins feature in the Jira Tool make it as perfect as desired task management tool for any company. One of the best Agile based Project Management Tools.

Incentivized

We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.

Incentivized

ServiceNow works as an enterprise solution.

Incentivized

• It has positively impacted our tech teams, allowing them to better organize the tasks and items they are working on and has greatly improved their ability to communicate & review these tasks with other teams.
• I believe it negatively impacted other departments as lengthy training was required by many associates to attempt using the tool, only to find out it didn't meet our needs, therefore much time was wasted.

Incentivized

• Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
• One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
• Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
• Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.

Incentivized