Recommended workflows for using JIRA Service Desk for product development

Question

Our team is currently using a 30-day trial of JIRA Service Desk to see if it can help us to provide better visibility into our product development with our customers and developers.Our desired workflow is pretty simple.

We currently use JIRA / JIRA Agile to manage our product development backlog. This includes new features, enhancements, bugs, and various other tasks. This backlog is only available to our internal development teams. Customer's email requests for help, new features, and bug reports are captured via spiceworks. These two systems are not integrated in any way. We need to manually update JIRA with the ticket number for any request made via spiceworks.

We would like to use JIRA Service Desk to enable our customers to submit Bugs, Questions, Enhancement, and Special Requests to directly to our JIRA backlog. Our initial thinking was we would enable JIRA Service Desk for our current JIRA project. A customer would submit a bug report (or other request) via JIRA Service Desk. The agent would view the request and interact with the customer to determine the validity of the request. If we chose to act upon it – such as fixing a bug – the ticket would then be assigned to one of the developers. Through Service Desk the customer could see that progress was being made on their request.

Awesome.

However, when we enabled JIRA Service Desk for an existing project the permissions were changed such that a collaborator (our developers) could not edit any aspect of their existing tickets. They could not change status, log work, update the description, etc. They could provide internal comments, but that is really about the extent of their abilities.

Given our limited experience it seems that the intended role of JIRA Service Desk is NOT to give customers a simplified direct line into your product backlog (as we had expected). Rather, JIRA Service Desk is a help desk support tool that is to be somewhat separate from your actual product backlog.

With all that back story, I have a couple questions.

* What is the intended purpose of JIRA Service Desk and how do you integrate with your development teams?
* Is the only way to relate a Service Desk ticket to a JIRA Project's ticket through the Issue Links?
* If so, how do you notify an agent of Service Desk that a related ticket has been completed so they may update the related Service Desk Ticket?

Raul_i68rpb · Answer

The Service Desk agent can escalate the issue to other Jira teams. Check this link

Jason Plumhoff · Answer

Hi Ryan,

You might also take a look at the Structure plugin as well.  My company uses JIRA to track and coordinate efforts between our software, hardware, and process engineering teams, as well as to manage our support requests.  Like issue links, Structure allows us to tie issues from different projects to one another (like a helpdesk ticket with a related development issue).  But Structure also allows nested hierarchies (useful for project management) and has synchronizers that can automatically roll up the status of the nested child issues to their parent issues.  I'd recommend you take a look at their docs and see if it might address your needs.

MikeyS · Answer

Hi, Ryan. You're running into a problem that seems common with the current model of Service Desk.  You seem to have a pretty good understanding of the scenario, so I can assure you that you're not missing anything obvious.

What is the intended purpose of JIRA Service Desk and how do you integrate with your development teams?

I can't speak for Atlassian, but it does seem that the intended use case for Service Desk is strictly as a help desk where you have a limited number of people (agents) working on those tickets.  It's a little frustrating when you try to integrate your Service Desk, but I can also understand why Atlassian put those limitations in place.

Is the only way to relate a Service Desk ticket to a JIRA Project's ticket through the Issue Links?

Issue Links seems like the best way to relate a Service Desk ticket to the resulting work in an engineering project.  If you wanted to give the Service Desk requester insight into the engineering issue, you could do something with permission and/or issue security schemes.

If so, how do you notify an agent of Service Desk that a related ticket has been completed so they may update the related Service Desk Ticket?

The JIRA Misc. Workflow Extensions plugin has a 'Transition Linked Issues' post-function that could possibly work. (Note: The cloud version of JMWE doesn't have this post-function.)  If you were just interested in notifications rather than automation, you could capture the Agent's username on the engineering issue using a custom field and modify the notification scheme to keep them informed.  Also, I haven't used it in this context, but it seems like Exocet could serve you well.