Team structure in Jira and Jira Service Desk

[gmora801]

I wanted to get some guidance and direction on how to structure teams/departments in Jira/JSD. Currently, our developers are using Jira Software and have encouraged our service desk to deploy JSD. The Service Desk is now evaluating JSD but was curious as to how to structure teams. By structure, if we take the Network Engineering department, would they be setup under JSD or JSW? Same goes for the DBAs for example. 

It is important that we structure this currectly so that we don't have to change things in the future. What has your company done for this? 

[Jack Brickey]

Greg,

before I can give you my $0.02 worth I need more info. Too I'm not sure what you mean by "...would they be setup under JSD or Jira Service Desk?". Did you mean to ask if they should use JSW or JSD or something else?

Questions:

1. Would your JSD customers be internal or external?
2. Do you plan to use both JSD and JSW? Often used scenarion - JSD is used as the tool to have customer raise and issue and the JSD Agents triage them and, if it is a SW issuse they create a linked issue to the appropriate JSW project.
3. Can you clarify what you mean by "structure teams/departments". In JSD you can create Organizations to group your customers. The most obvious use of this is as a means of supporting multiple external organizations placing their users into the appropriate org. You can use this for internal folks as well, e.g Engineering, Sales, etc. Personally I haven't seen a need for this but I'm sure others do. Maybe your question originates from a thought that you would create projects in JSD for each team/dept?

Again, with a bit more understanding of your organization and needs I could provide more useful info.

[gmora801]

Hi Jack, 

Thank you for your reply and pointing out my mistake in my post. I have fixed it in my original question. 

1. JSD customers and users will all be internal (would deploy for external use at a later point but still only used for inernal employess).

2. Yes we plan to use both side by side. 

3. What I mean is that, in our current tool for example, under incident management we can assign an engineer/team a task to complete in order for our incident to be able to close. If we take network engineering as an example, they would log into our current tool to work on the task and resolve it once it is complete; notifying the incident owner. In our current tool, everyone is set up under the one tool, but seeing JSW and JSD, the question they have is should all the teams other than service desk be in JSW or if IT departments/teams (Networking, Telecom, DBA, Server, etc.) should be in JSD while development (Web, Internal Tools, QA, etc.) be in JSW.

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks. So FWIW, here is how we use and others seem to use in a similar fashion.

I use JSD to service the entire organization as "customers". Customer open job requests and/or report issues. I use JSW for business and SW processes. If an issue opened in JSD translates to one of my business or SW processes then the agent creates a linked issue from the original to the appropriate project. Here are some examples that might help...

• Corrective Action Requests - this is a project in JSD that may result in a linked issue in one of the JSW projects, e.g. 'we need to update the SW code review process document'.
• IT - this is a project in JSD that is used for reporting everthing from actual network or other pure IT issues to internal product issues, e.g. our ERP SW or homegrown applicaitons. If it is purely IT then IT deals with it. However, if it belongs to a group that is working out of JSW, e.g. our product develpment teams then a linked issue is created.

We use linked issues rather than Moving them out of JSD to JSW so that the Customer (originator) doesn't loose site of the issue. There are ways, thru automation, to resolved the JSD issue when the JSW issue is resolved.

The key reasons I choose to use JSD rather than JSW for a projects include:

• The originator doesn't need full access to the JIRA application. They only need to create issues and be updated on them. This keeps the cost under control among other things. The portal and email work well for the customer.
• SLAs - I want the built in capabilities that JSD provides.
• Automation - I want the built in cababilities that JSD provides.

I use JIRA for the following reasons:

• The team is a product development team and all members need to have 'full' access.
• I want to use Kanban or Scrum boards.
• The project is some form of business process.

there are a lot of things to consider and I will say that I find myself thinking thru which way to go on some new projects that pop up but in the end the above generally guides me.

[gmora801]

So if I understand correctly, your IT specific departments/teams log into JSD, not JSW. Where as your Developers have logins to JSW and not JSD. 

Is that correct? 

So my network engineers will login and live within JSD?

[Jack Brickey]

more or less that is the case. my IT group acts as 'customer service' group for internal issues be that pure IT or business applications (3rd party or homegrown tools). That said the JSD agents are also members of JSW for various reasons. Conversely, the JSW users are not JSD agents but some are Collaborators on JSD issues (can comment and view but not otherwise edit/transition).

Yes I would say your network engineers would work w/in JSD. I think you will want to give them JSW access to, at least if they will need to create issues in JSW, e.g. the create linked issue scenario.