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How do you structure your JSM portal for internal IT? Network at Unleash event or digitally

Barbara Rauch

Hello everyone,

I am looking for people interested in an exchange on how to structure your Jira Service Management portal well for internal IT. If you are using JSM in a large enterprise with internal IT, ideally internationally, and would like to chat, please get in touch.

I will be at the Unleash event in Berlin this week (9 February) in case you're also there and want to meet up in person. Otherwise we could connect online.

In a little more detail, I want to know how many forms (customer request types) and projects you have, if you use the standard out-of-the box portal or add-ons like Refined. I'd also be interested to hear who creates the forms and if/how you do quality control on them to make sure the end user ends up with a simple, easy to understand portal.
We started out with the approach that every resolver team can create their own forms, and this has been great in terms of speed, but has led to a portal that is not great for users: It's hard to find the right form to fill out and there's sometimes a lack of consistency between forms.

PS. We're currently using Jira/JSM Server versions and might move to Data Center.

Comments

Dave LIAO

For your org, how many resolver teams exist in a service desk project? Just curious!

I’ve seen teams employ change management on their entire project, which slows down change, but prevents unintended consequences.

I’ve worked with teams that have a Product Owner, which helps focus their team offerings - and their forms! - and this model has been good. Of course, not all teams need (or can afford) a full-time PO.

David Yu

We let users design their own forms, but provide general documentation on best practices. Left to their own devices, users generally put more questions/customfields than necessary which is the part that I think frustrates end-users. For streamlining, we provide users the option to pre-populate the description with some basic questions. This lets us get by mainly with just Summary, description, attachment, CC for majority of requests.

For the forms that really do need more questionnaire-like responses, Proforma is an option that lets users design more advanced forms with question branching. Though feature development on Proforma on-prem has nearly stopped to a trickle.

The breakdown in the qty of request types usually comes down to how detailed you want to report stats or SLAs. I think about roughly 30 request types for us. For projects, we keep one project per team. For example, IT is one project, HR might be another. Refined would be nice for branding but if you are short on resources, I would view it as something optional.

Dave LIAO

💯 this!

More often than not, requests for additional fields can be represented as pre-filled questions in a text field (like Description).

I find ScriptRunner to be useful in pre-populating these writing prompts.

Barbara Rauch

Hi Dave, thanks for your quick reply. Our largest service desk project has 70-80 resolver groups, and many of them create their own forms, i.e. some of their members have project admin rights. Most teams have POs but I guess their focus isn't always on the team's form. My main concern is about cross-team alignment here, though. When each team creates their own forms for the services/applications they are responsible for, you can end up e.g. with 20 separate application access request forms. From an end user perspective, I'd say a single form is desirable to request access for any application, or even a single form for anything related to software. That would mean having one form to serve the needs of several teams. We're looking into using Extension for JSM - which we have anyway - to create dynamic forms that adapt to the needs of each team to do just that.

Barbara Rauch

Hi David & Dave, thanks for your quick replies! I like the hack for pre-populating you shared, David, and understand it's also what Dave is describing. That's a nice way to avoid additional custom fields and still get the data you want. However, we are pushing for the automation of service requests, so often forms should contain all the questions that a team requires for that in a way we can use to trigger automated steps - in the simplest case that means each piece of information in a separate Jira field.
In our case the large number of forms doesn't come from reporting requirements, but rather from the fact that we have loads of teams within a single IT project (70-80), and each team has created forms to manage tickets related to their own services - see my reply to Dave's other post above. That combined with the fact the aforementioned large IT project isn't the only IT project on the portal - there are other, smaller ones serving specific areas. This leads to a portal structure which is really hard to navigate for end users. I believe we need to radically reduce the number of forms, and have a small number where each covers many different services/teams. We have ProForma but since it doesn't support Insight / asset management fields yet we're looking into using the Dynamic Forms feature of Extension for JSM to create the branching questions. We might have these complex forms managed by a central team again, rather than all affected resolver teams.
David, you say you're allocating one project per team and gave IT as one team example. What team size are you talking about in this case? For us, having all of IT in one project would mean hundreds of agents / many dozens of teams working in the same project.

Adam Nichols (DISH)

Greetings Barbara

We are still building out our JSM portal and currently have 40+ forms across 20+ teams. We would be more than happy to share what we have and would love to see what you have as well. One challenge we have is that we have 65+ vendors (Cisco, Oracle, Dell, Nokia, Samsung,....) who all submit requests through our portal, so we would love to hear about your environment, challenges, and unique solutions!

Talk soon!

adam

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