Item: Jira Service Management
Rating: 7
Author: Mark Hetherington

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it across the whole organization for tracking issues and planning tasks on development projects. It shows areas that need work and allows us to track progress on the projects and the issues within them to produce reports for management on the progress. It is easy to create dashboards to highlight the immediate needs of the project and filter out those issues that can wait until a later time.

Pros and Cons

Custom dashboards to show the most relevant information to users and teams at a glance
Good issue management and tracking showing how an issue has been process and progressed over time
Notification options so that issues are highlighted to individuals when not using the app to ensure that important ones are not missed.

The custom dashboard setup can get a little confusing when first using them, could do with a wizard to help things along
Default dashboards do not seem intuitive so maybe when adding a project there could be a template selection to direct the default dashboards to some that make sense
At first glance, the package looks a little overwhelming. Maybe a basic/advanced view would help make it seem more friendly for new users.

Return on Investment

Great for tracking issues and getting the right tasks to the right people
Encourages developers to collaborate on tasks and quickly redirect them to the appropriate person to deal with them
Good reporting to internal and external teams.

Alternatives Considered

Spiceworks Help Desk (188), custom software and webisssues

When we completed our merger with another company, they were already using Jira so it made sense for us to use a common solution. Their experience and investment with the package was a major factor in choosing it over our current tools and those we were researching for future use. They helped set everything up to get us running quickly and to import data from our existing solutions into Jira

Other Software Used

Visual Studio IDE, Apache Subversion, PostgreSQL

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for teams working on large projects where you need to track issues and development and respond to problems that have arisen with end users. Overkill for very small projects or teams where you do not need such an extensive package to manage the issues and tasks on the projector within the team and would benefit from a more lightweight solution.

JIRA service desk connecting developers to issues

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Service Desk