Asset Reservation in Jira and JSM: 3 Use Cases and How to Do It

[#1]

Most organizations have assets as well as people who need to use them. But types of assets and their users can vary. This can make it tricky to find a simple booking solution that's fast to implement and works for your organization.

Some standalone asset reservation applications are set up for a single use case, such as only managing IT equipment or software licenses, and lack the flexibility to modify or tailor the solution to your needs. Others have so many features they're hard to use. Not to mention, that many asset management systems don’t support reservation functionality at all and in such cases, you have to implement your own booking solution with integrations. Plus, it's usually a challenge to find, acquire, learn and implement any new application — not to mention getting your users trained and used to doing something new.

We discovered that it was possible to manage the reservation of assets in Jira and came up with an easy way to do it that can work for a variety of teams who are already using Jira and Jira Service Management in their organization.

Here are three use cases where you might find Jira asset reservation helpful, plus how to implement it for your organization.

3 Use Cases for Asset Reservation

One of the challenges of finding an asset reservation solution is that there are so many variables for assets and users. For example, your organization may have a variety of assets you would like to make available for use, such as:

• Building facilities

• Equipment or property

• People in your organization

You could also have a variety of users needing to make use of different types of assets, such as:

• Employees

• Volunteers

• Customers

• Clients

• Members of the public

But using Jira and JSM, you can easily implement an asset reservation system that caters to any combination of these assets and users. Here are three hypothetical examples:

1. Booking a Meeting Room

A building's facilities are often key. While many organizations went remote a few years ago, a lot of teams have since returned to the office. Even when a team is hybrid, most want to make the best use of building facilities when they have them available to improve in-person collaboration.

It's possible to book a room for such meetings in standard office software, as well as on pen and paper, but these systems can leave a lot of questions unanswered, such as:

• Are the organization's available meeting room facilities being utilized effectively?

• How much demand for space is there? Too much? Not enough?

• How do we advertise what rooms are available and communicate their current status?

Instead, you can simply manage your meeting room bookings in Jira. This can give your organization more insight into how your building's facilities are being used. It's also easier to communicate to your users if a particular room will be unavailable for bookings due to prior bookings, maintenance or another issue.

Plus, unlike work email programs and in-person sign-up sheets, Jira meeting room bookings can be set up so that non-employees can book a room from any computer. This is great if parts of your facilities are open to the public or a vendor or VIP is coming into town and wants to book a room for a presentation, meeting or training session.

2. Borrowing a Corporate Vehicle

A lot of organizations today have at least one corporate vehicle of some type. Some maintain a full fleet of cars for travel between the office and off-site locations for site visits, meetings, deliveries or other appointments. But even having a few small utility golf carts can be handy if your organization has a large, spread-out campus with multiple buildings.

No matter the type of vehicles in your fleet, it's a must to track and manage their usage. But most teams run into two issues:

1. Scale: The available options may be the wrong size and fit for your needs. It's true that several enterprise solutions are available for managing fleets, but these applications may not make sense if your organization doesn't have a large fleet of vehicles. Not to mention their high costs.

2. Inefficiencies: With the regular go-to solutions being too big, that brings most organizations back to less-than-ideal systems, such as pen and paper sign-out sheets or a single point person in your facilities department responsible for the keys.

Jira can be a good solution for your vehicle sign-out needs in such situations. The scale of your solution can be customized to fit your needs, including if you just have one or two vehicles, yet you can still benefit from the efficiencies of an online self-serve system.

While meeting rooms and golf carts are quite different types of assets, managing both types of bookings is possible through Jira and uses a similar configuration setup. This flexibility of Jira is one of its best features, making it a good solution for lots of different equipment and property assets that don't typically fall into a standard IT asset management category.

3. Making a 1-on-1 Appointment

Along with building facilities and company equipment, there is one other type of assets your organization may want to manage bookings for: your people. Many organizations have professionals with specialized skills or personnel with delegated authority. Appointment bookings are the smart way to make the best uses of these resources.

But whether these people assets need to meet with others internally or externally, there are cases where booking such appointments through an office email program or front desk phone calls may not be the best option. For example, you may need to:

• Have a self-serve solution, allowing users to book their own appointments without taking up the time of the professional or front desk personnel to check their current schedule and make, reschedule or cancel their appointments.

• Be able to communicate changing availability or schedules of your personnel upfront, without having to send out one-off emails or regularly update a master schedule.

• Track use of these available resources to understand patterns, demand and workload, helping you to make future scheduling or even additional hiring decisions.

Jira is also a good solution for such 1-on-1 appointment needs. Everything can be set up to be self-serve appointment-wise, saving your people from the headaches of routine scheduling tasks. Your team can easily update the availability for bookings to reflect schedule changes, office closings and so on. Plus, you will have a better insight into the usage patterns and demands of your people assets.

How to Manage Your Asset Reservations in Jira

If you are looking to manage your organization's asset reservations in Jira, you have to make two important decisions:

1. Where are the assets kept? It's possible to use your Jira instance to keep track of your bookable assets in the form of work items. In this case, work items will be used to represent individual assets. Assets can be defined in one or several projects, either company or team managed. Any workflow or issue type can be used. A JQL expression defines the subset of Jira tickets eligible for bookings. JSM Assets is another option that can serve as the source for keeping track of your bookable assets. Advanced AQL can be used here to get an AQL expression that defines the correct subset of assets eligible for bookings.

2. Are you going to use a JSM project or vanilla Jira project to handle bookings? The JSM project has the advantage of being accessible to any user without a need for a regular Jira license and somehow better user experience, as booking would be happening inside the portal.

3. At this point, you have a source of assets defined and the booking project to run the actual reservations. But how do you match these two together? Some problems still have to be addressed, just to name a few:

   1. How to identify if an asset is available for booking for a particular time?

   2. How to link from a booking ticket to the asset being booked?

   3. How to prevent double and over-booking?

   4. How to enforce specific schedules and durations for the bookings? For example, you want to have a meeting room to be bookable between 8am and 5pm on workdays for up to 2hours.

   5. How to track the booking history?

Introducing Raley Bookman - Assets Reservation from JSM Portal

Raley Bookman is our latest app that lets you easily manage asset bookings. Bookman provides a single-window booking facility based on the JSM Portal. Your employees, customers or other users can go to the familiar JSM Help Center, choose the kind of asset they want and make a reservation for it. As our use case examples demonstrate, these assets can be anything you need them to be, from rooms to vehicles to personnel.

With our app, you get an out-of-the-box fully self-serviced solution. Users can only make bookings for the dates and times you set, easily preventing double-bookings or booking outside available hours. Users also receive a ticket generated on their behalf with their reservation details when booking an asset.

Raley also shows available bookings on resource timeline view, so If the desired asset is not available for particular times, you can easily find another one that fits your needs. Or, alternatively, find another timeslot when the asset is available. Here's how it looks like:

The asset view allows you to see the actual asset utilization and monitor its usage. This makes users more accountable for the assets they book and.helps your team gain insights into usage patterns and make decisions about resource allocation and future investments.

As an experienced Atlassian vendor , we are also focused on offering a user-friendly setup and easy implementation of Raley Bookman for managing your asset bookings in Jira. Our solution can be customized to suit your needs and support is always there if you need it. Plus, we aim to be responsive to your feedback on bugs or new feature requests.

Get your trial now on Atlassian Marketplace and make the most of your assets!