Item: Jira Service Management
Rating: 8
Author: Chinthaka Jayawardane

Overall Satisfaction with Jira Service Management

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Jira Service Management in office as the single source of truth for enterprise service desk related functions. Jira Service Management covers incident, problem and service request management. Jira Service Management is customised in terms of Technical vertical units where Managed services, Shared Services and IT Admin team have heavily customised profiles and dashboards for their presepctive individual purposes and KPI's for their specific funtional unit objectives. We have a focussed Team performing backend customizations starting from Basic setup, complex automations to bespoke functionality. We have performed in-house customizations in designing the portal, build workflows, create forms, automated workflows and rest api's.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Seamless devops integration - As Jira Service Management is an integrated platform it offers easy integration with jira software and when a customer reports a bug via service desk agents are able to link it back directly to the respective developers backlog items which can be pulled into sprint backlogs in return
Customizations - Jira Service Management has incredible customization capabilities which can be used to build aautomated workflows, custom service requests types and detailed sla's which can be tailored to specific business needs
Portal based end user experience - The end user portal is an easy to use interface which can be heavily customised and it serves as a self-service portal which is also a one-stop-shop for end users which is a great convinience

Cons

Compleixity and steep learning curve - while Jira Service Management is powerful its a bit difficult for the average tech guy to setup correctly during a short time period, backend is a bit overhelming with similar looking features which leads to confusion
Pricing and licensing model - Jira Service Management is quite expensive compared to its competitors in the market, especially considering that its charging model aims the number of service desk agents and the licensing for end-users is free. Further many advanced features required higher-tier plans
Performance clutter - The interfaces can sometimes feel cluttered and heavy, when the instance is heavily customised with complex automation and plugins the users may fell slow loads times.

Return on Investment

Negative - The steep learning curve of Jira Service Management puts a bit of lag on immediate to short term ROI both tangible and intangible unless the implementation is handled by advanced experts and most efficiency related automations are immediately applied.
Positive - Once the full automation flows(ticket based) for incident, service and problem are fully configured we would be able to immediately measure savings in terms of effort saving, time saving in terms of ROI
Mixed - ROI - The fastest way to obtain good results is to list down both tangible, nontangible, non financial ROI and to build project based KPI, metrics which will provide ROI in 1-3 months

Usability

Jira Service Management offers great functionality in terms of basic and advanced ticketing features in terms of Incident, Problem and Service Request management which is super handy for organizations suzh as MSP and shared services and in converting respective service management practice metric to business inteliigence statistics. It can by easily customised to suit specific service delivery needs based in markets and different industries as such can be adopted faily fast expecting quick1-3 months ROI as such providing this rating

Alternatives Considered

Freshservice, ManageEngine ADManager Plus and Atlassian Jira

JSA has specific focussed technical verticals concentrating on ticking and service desk features such Incident management, Service request management, Problem management, Configurations management, Serivce desk, End user mobile app, Performance dashboards, Cutom reports, Custom dashboard which can be tuned to suite individual business verticals such as MSP, ISP, SHared services , Devops functions individually which is a plus when selecting a ITSM product.

Key Insights

Do you think Jira Service Management delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Jira Service Management's feature set?

Yes

Did Jira Service Management live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Jira Service Management go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Jira Service Management again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams, Mozilla Firefox, FortiClient

Likelihood to Recommend

A mid sized technology company which needs to support 500+ employees and where the engineering team already uses jira software for coding and bug tracking the devops bridge where employee reports a bug in the portal and support agent can directly link it to the developers backlog will definately support the operations further with the Jira ITIL readiness and inbuilt asset management features will greatly support. However considering an organization such as a retail company handling thousands of user complaints daily will have issues as the Jira Service Management interface is aligned towards a ticket based apprach rather than a user centric approach.

Jira Service Management Feature Ratings

Using Jira Service Management

Users and Roles

500 - The scope of end users using Jira in within business functions such as Administration, Finance, Logistics, Devops, Engineering, Shared Services, Managed services and Global Information technology operations. Apart from the above business functional units the applications is used to cover geographically dispersed locations in terms of regional offices in asia pacific

Support Headcount Required

3 - Technical and administration skills-Workflow architecture, jira query language, automation engine and scheme management, assets & cmdb. ITSM and knowledge process-Incident & problem management,change enablement, service level management, service request managementService design and soft skills-portal ux design, knowledge management, stakeholder communication. In terms of roles for Jira Administrators, JQL, API Integrations, Security, Upgrades ir required. For Service project Admins - Queues, SLAs, Request Types, Automation is required and for ITSM lead ITIL 4 Certification, Change Management, Reporting is required

Business Processes Supported

Tool integration and Triage - Many clients have their own internal tools (like Azure DevOps for their developers or another Jira instance)
Integrated asset Management - Used for tracking the devices and lifecycle
Extensive SLA support - Defining multiple metrics and SLA for multiple customers

Innovative Uses

Information and Knowledge retention - Ticket based information can be used and a central knowledge repository
End User and System behaviors - Use triaging and ticket based statistics for integrating with BI tools for generating predictions and new patterns
Performance KPI's for IT devision - Use SLA, MTTR, Downtime/uptime statistics and assign then to tech groups and individuals for performance monitoring of IT Operations and progress

Future Planned Uses

One stop shop - A single one stop shop for eacalating all end user requirements
For consumer data gathering - Contacting end users which multiple data touchpoints for attaining rapid feedback
Coroporate Branding and marketing - Use the tools and a direct B2C method for launching of trial/test/prototype/mvp products

Likelihood to Renew

In the current contect the requirments is around having a tool that is focused and can handle large ticket volumes and tracking incident, problem and user requests concerning end users. Jira has built in functionality to address the above practice needs faily easily and has a substantial amount of customizable reports for generating the relevant intelligence.

Comments

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