[NEW] Jira Service Management Lightning Talks Q&A

Emily Dang

  

Hi everyone! We are currently running a new Jira Service Management Lightning Talk series and we want to keep the conversations going after each episode ends. As part of our follow-up to each webinar, we are collecting some of the top questions and answering them here for you. We are breaking the questions down by each episode, which you can navigate through below.

Once an episode airs, it will be available on-demand, so feel free to post your unanswered questions here for any of the episodes.

Please register here to watch the Lightning Talks.

Here is a rundown of the episodes in the Lightning Talk series:

• Taking Jira Service Management Premium to the next level with automation
• Better together: incident and change management
• Enterprise service management 101: request management for non-technical teams
• Move at lightning speed with the new forms experience

• How we built it: HR powers a remote culture with Jira Service Management 

• How we built it: modernizing Atlassian’s own IT service desk

• Supercharging your service management frontline with conversational ticketing

 

Episode 1: Taking Jira Service Management Premium to the next level with automation

Question	Answer
We use a cascading field and have discovered that automation rules do not acknowledge or reference this custom field, can you advise how we can populate a cascading field with automation?	We recommend taking a look at this community post as it appears to be in line with what you are asking. Customers have used the advanced compare option in automation to achieve similar results with cascading fields. If you run into issues with this method, we recommend contacting Atlassian support for additional help with this topic: https://support.atlassian.com/
Can you clarify how many global and multi-project automation rules Premium includes and how single project automation compare across plans?	Single project automation is unlimited across all plans, but keep in mind that you need to apply this type of automation to each project individually. For example, if you have 10 projects, and want a similar rule to apply to all those projects, you would need to set the rule up 10 times. The benefit of global or multi-project automation is that you only need to create one rule, and then you can pick and choose which projects the rule applies to in your cloud site, or you can just apply it to all projects. You can also use the global automation tool to manage all of your rules in one place. For multi-project and global automation, customers on our free plan have access to 100 rule executions per month, and customers on the standard plan have access to 500 rule executions per month. Premium customers have access to 1000 global and multi-project rules per paid licensed user per month. As an example, if you had 200 licensed users, you would have 200,000 automation rules per month.
Why does a Sandbox not include existing automations?	Please take a look at this documentation. support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/manage-product-sandboxes/#Managesandboxes-Copydatatoasandbox If this does not work, or you need more help, we recommend contacting support at support.atlassian.com.
After an Automation has worked on an issue, users need to refresh the site to see the result, e.g. a custom field being filled. Can't a refresh also be included in the automation?	We do not have auto-refresh automation but we will provide that feature idea feedback to our product team.
Are automation rules included with Data Center plans or is there an additional cost?	Automation for Jira is currently a standalone app for Data Center that you can download here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215460/automation-for-jira-data-center-and-server?tab=overview&hosting=datacenterPricing Pricing can be found here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215460/automation-for-jira-data-center-and-server?tab=pricing&hosting=datacenterNote Note that Atlassian does plan on including automation for Jira as part of a data center native functionality in the future. Keep an eye on our roadmap for updates: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center?&search=automation
Is Premium available for all platforms (cloud, DC, server). I am interested in Insight for Data Center.	Premium is a Cloud plan only but Insight is available for Data Center. It was added to Jira Service Management Data Center 4.15 and is available for new version releases. If you use 4.14 or earlier, you can still use the App from the Atlassian marketplace.
Can Insight be used with Jira Software or Jira Work Management projects?	Yes, Insight objects can be linked to Jira Software or Jira Work Management issues as long as there’s an active Jira Service Management Premium or Enterprise license in the same instance.
What’s the difference between Free and Premium incident management capabilities in Jira Service Management?	There’s quite a difference in functionality in regards to incident management. Jira Service Management Premium includes full end-to-end incident capabilities, from the first alert through to resolution and postmortem: it includes, Incident investigation view: Hook your Bitbucket to Jira Service Management and when a deployment-related incident occurs, you can see the commits that impacted the service in question directly from the incident details screen. Insight asset and configuration management: Jira native-configuration management database (CMDB) brings context, data, and assets directly into your service request, incident, and change practices Advanced change management: Set gates based upon the type of change request, get approval, and minimize risk while ensuring dev work can still proceed efficiently.
I am on Jira Service Management Server now. What is Atlassian doing to make it easier for Jira Service Management Server customers to move to Jira Service Management Cloud?	We’ve been working hard to make it as easy as possible for our customers to move to Cloud. Today, Jira Service Management Cloud migrations are supported in the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant, a free Atlassian-built app available for download in the Atlassian Marketplace. Using Jira Cloud Migration Assistant, you can now migrate JSM projects, users, groups, and customers to a JSM Cloud site. For more information, I recommend visiting the Cloud Migration Collection in Community or our Atlassian Support documentation. To get started migrating JSM data to Cloud, use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant - the assistant is already installed in Jira Software 8.14 and above if you are currently using Jira Software, or the migration assistant can be downloaded from the Atlassian Marketplace.

 

Episode 2: Better together: incident and change management

Question	Answer
I am already using Jira Service Management - how do I take advantage of the new features you talked about?	All of this functionality is available today. check out our product guides to learn how to set it up for your use case: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/product-guide
How do these capabilities differ across plans?	Deployment gating is only available in Premium but the rest of the functionality shown today is available across all tiers, with some limitations that can be found here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/pricing
Do I have to use bitbucket, I currently use Jenkins will that work?	No, you do not need to use Bitbucket, Jenkins will work with our change management functionality https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/link-jira-service-management-with-jenkins/

 

Episode 3: Enterprise service management 101: request management for non-technical teams

Question	Answer
Is there a limit on the number of projects I can create for the teams at my company?	There is no limit on the number of projects that you can have in Jira Service Management. Keep in mind that any new projects you create can be established via one of our pre-configured templates. Additionally, when creating a project, you can use the settings from an existing service project as well.
Is Insight available for all Jira Service Management plans?	Insight Asset and Configuration management is only available for our Premium and Enterprise plans for Jira Service Management Cloud. If you are using Jira Service Management Data Center, Insight is included with version 4.15 and later, but you can also download it at no extra cost for earlier versions of Jira Service Management Data Center from the Atlassian Marketplace.
My organization currently has about 11 projects across IT and business teams. What is the easiest way to migrate all those projects to the Cloud? Do I need to move them one at a time?	For server customers migrating Jira Service Management to the Cloud, or any Jira product for that matter, we recommend using the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant. The Jira Cloud Migration Assistant enables you to easily migrate Jira Service Management projects, users, groups, and customers in one streamlined process. This is a free app, built and maintained by Atlassian, that can be installed on your Jira Server instance from the Atlassian Marketplace. The app is also included automatically in Jira Software 8.14 or higher. For more information regarding the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant, we recommend checking out our migration support documentation.
Is there a way to automate responses to employees based on the request type or fields they select?	Yes, you can use native automation in Jira Service Management to accomplish this. For example, if a specific request type is selected, you can use the automation action “send email” to send a templated email to the recipient with a list of resources based on that request type. Let’s say they are asking about benefits, so you craft an automation rule to send the links to all your benefits resources in the response. By doing this, you may find that the employee resolves their request with these resources, saving you time.
What is the best way to learn about forms in Jira Service Management?	For those who are interested in learning about the forms we showed earlier in the demo, we recommend watching this Forms lightning talk. This webinar will showcase forms in great detail, including settings. The title of the webinar is “Move at lightning speed with the new forms experience.”

 

Episode 4: Enterprise service management 101: request management for non-technical teams

Question	Answer
Are Forms features are available in Data Center and Server instances?	Forms features are available for Data Center and Server through the ProForma Marketplace app. There are plans to continue development of the Data Center and Server versions of ProForma, but we’re not able to share exactly what the roadmap looks like right now.
I already use the ProForma Cloud app. Will I be able to migrate my data into this new integrated version?	ProForma cloud customers should continue using the Marketplace app until we reach out to confirm migration. When we do migrate your forms, all of your forms and data will be moved and nothing will be lost.
Can we use Insight data with Forms?	Not at the moment but we are working on that integration. Keep an eye on our roadmap for updates: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center?&search=automation
How can I make sure my Form fields are reportable?	You can link any Form field to a Jira field. This makes the data captured searchable and reportable. It’s important to note that only one Form field can be linked to any given Jira field. You can’t link more than one Form field to the same Jira field.
What’s the difference using Forms between Jira Service Management, Jira Software, and Jira Work Management?	In Jira Service Management, you can use forms in the portal to create requests and attach forms to issues to collect additional information either from customers or agents. In Jira Software and Jira Work Management, forms can create issues within Jira and be added to issues to collect more information. You can find more information on Issue Forms here. There will be minor updates to ProForma’s settings and automations. We will share more details on that in the coming months.
Can you share some use cases on how others have used Forms?	We have use cases for teams like HR, IT, Marketing, and more. Keep an eye on Community for a series of use case posts we’ll be publishing in the next week or so.

 

Episode 5: How we built it: HR powers a remote culture with Jira Service Management

Question	Answer
Can you expand on how and where specifically you’re using Jira Service Management to power the G’Day platform?	There’s a lot of content on G’Day and it’s all managed by the internal comms team. A really important part of that is making sure we have a lot of organization around the content that we want to schedule to go on the site. We also want to make sure it’s a really easy process for those who want to communicate something company-wide to raise that with the internal comms team to have that scheduled.   So, it’s all powered by Jira Service Management and we have a dashboard where tickets can be raised through Jira Service Management. The ticket then comes through to the internal comms team where they can prioritize everything, interact back with the requestor of the content, and schedule a time and date for the content to go out. We’ve built a calendar view all powered by the Jira platform where we can have a really good view of all the schedules for those announcements going out. Jira Service Management is a really important part of the way the back-end is managed with G’Day.
Culture and community are something that we are struggling to retain as we switch to remote work. How has Jira Service Management or G’Day helped you maintain that at Atlassian?	We really wanted G’Day to have a focus on culture and community, so we included a dedicated section for that there. The culture and community section of the home page is a really great sport for us to also share wins that we’ve had from around the organization, for example, if someone has an insightful customer story to share. It’s also an opportunity for us to share moments in someone’s career, like the Congratlassians that we talked about earlier, where we can celebrate those who have been with us for 3 years, 5 years, and 10 years. It’s a really good place to show people’s faces and build that sense of connectedness that may be missing when we moved to remote work. So I think that has been a really big positive for us at Atlassian. In addition to that, I think the sharing from person to person is a really important part of this platform. Rather than just having a one-way driven communication from the organization to an employee, allowing employees to communicate with each other on the platform is a really important part of building a strong remote culture, and we’ve seen a lot of engagement through that system on the platform.
You mentioned integrating Confluence, Jira Software, and Jira Service Management to build G’Day. How have you maintained simplifying all these cross-product experiences?	We’ve been building G’Day as an employee platform that brings in the contextual elements and the power of each of these products. For example, Confluence brings in all of the rich content that you can interact with. And Jira Service Management is used for the back-end integration of how you streamline the content management that you’re about to broadcast globally or regionally. So that’s the power of how we are looking at the linkages of the interoperability between these products.

 

Episode 6: How we built it: modernizing Atlassian’s own IT service desk

Question	Answer
What size team did it take to do this?	We had a fairly small core team size - project managers, business analysts, and then a person to build on each of the products, Jira, Halp, and Confluence, to cover each of those entry points. The core team was around 8 people for the majority of the design and build.
How long did it take to implement?	It took 6 months to implement, which included design and project framework along with a delivery plan, buy-in with stakeholders, and creation of IT champions.
What advice would you have for others considering something similar?	Do it. Start. With Jira & Halp you can spin up a single entry point for support out of the box. Confluence is so straightforward and tying it to the Jira Service Management Help Portal is even easier. Its never been easier to integrate Atlassian products for a holistic service desk solution.
What was the biggest challenge?	In order to embrace consistency, some teams had to let go of some very unique and highly customized service desks. We always anchored back to the need for simplicity and consistency for scalability, and that getting help shouldn’t be hard.
What would you do differently?	We would have done it sooner. We had to be very thoughtful with this much organizational change to take into account. Thanks to the flexibility of Atlassian products and our ability to deliver so quickly, we still got it done in less than 6 months.
Can we do without chat support?	Jira Service Management is at the core and a requirement. You could use this without the chat support requirement, but Halp, for us, was an integral part of our solution. Like many companies, a significant number of our employees use chat at the core of their communications. Halp integration really allowed us to meet our customers where they were coming from, and again, kept the request synced with tickets in Jira Service Management. Chat support brought so many benefits for everyone so we’d strongly recommend considering chat as part of your service offering. If you’re not quite ready for chat though, Jira Service Management and Confluence Knowledge Base stand on their own, together.

 

Episode 7: Supercharging your service management frontline with conversational ticketing

Question	Answer
Is this feature available for data center customers?	This new chat functionality is only available natively for cloud. We don't currently have any plans to support this on data center. However, Data Center customers can continue to purchase Halp separately in order to use this functionality. The same goes for Jira Software and Jira Work Management users.
What are some upcoming features on the roadmap?	Private Replies is typically used by more sensitive teams that want to keep the communication on the issue between just the requester and the agents. By enabling this on your project, it will move all comments on the ticket to a DM with the requester, rather than in the request channel. Hiding request types in Slack is used for one-way ticket creation. We will allow you to disable the creation of certain request types in Slack, but still enable you to send those inbound request types to Slack when created via Jira Service Management. Auto-create: Right now, a lot of the ownership is on the agent to keep an eye on the request channel. With Auto-create, you can enable your request channel to assume a message in a channel is an issue, and it will send the list of Request Types directly to the requester to fill out the form. This means your agents no longer have to live in the request channel. They can live either in the triage channel, or JSM itself.
Can I use this in shared channels?	Yes! Slack connect channels work great with JSM Chat and conversational ticketing. Just set your Slack Connect channel as a request channel, and start creating tickets from messages posted. We actually use Chat in all of our shared channels with our enterprise customers. It allows us to raise requests directly to our support team in Jira with just an emoji.

You can register and watch all episodes here.

 

Andy Gladstone

@Emily Dang this is an amazing summary! Thank you for taking the time to put it together - I will certainly be referencing this in the future.