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

It is well suited for medium to large companies that require a tool to allow users to create IT requests, have a self-service portal, track the completion of such requests and have access to KPIs to understand the satisaction level of the requestors. It is not the best tool if you want to have a heavy personalized IT Service Management tool to cater to all your needs or when you want to have an easy way to search for past tickets using specific keywords.

Incentivized

• 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

• Integration
• Good search capabilities. Applications are created within CMDB and we can search for the app to see the changes, incidents and problems created
• Reporting. Great store of MIS reports and will let you to create custom reports
• Visual Task Boards - use it as Kanban boards

• 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

• Finding requests that I opened and have since been completed by the assigned group/individual is very difficult to accomplish unless I've written down the request numbers somewhere.
• Requests that I opened and are subsequently closed, often continue to appear in the list of "My Open Requests" giving the appearance that they were not completed when in fact they were.
• It may exist, but if it does I haven't found it yet, which makes it less than intuitive, but I would like to see the ability to recall a request in ServiceNow.
• I believe our firewall rule change request for is a custom form, but it has a serious drawback. If I submit such a request and need to make a correction to it before it is approved, there isn't anyway for me to do so. The request has to first be rejected with the creation of a sub-task in order to edit it before it is resubmitted for approval.

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

It has helped us a lot, and after some training and getting to know the product, we are quite comfortable with it and feel much more capable of understanding what's going on in our IT environment. The only reason it doesn't get a perfect score from me is that there is a learning curve for both end users and IT admins using ServiceNow. Once you customize the UI and remove unnecessary fields. You are left with a very clean product that does what it needs to and does it well.

Incentivized

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

• We don't currently have a CMDB, so we are leveraging ServiceNow to build one using their ITSM and ITOM tools. This is a huge gap for us as a company and it will be a big win once this is in place.
• The core help desk functions are comparable to most other tools on the market, but SN does a great job of integrating that data with other modules like Problem, Change and Event Management to provide a truly integrated solution.
• The tool is expensive, so you will need to try to do as much as you can with the platform. We currently use other systems for HAM and SAM but will be including these in our ServiceNow instance in the future to help maximize our ROI.

Incentivized