How to manage large Jira Service Management projects?

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Adapting your service desk for Enterprise can be challenging. Managing many tickets and incidents while sustaining customer support requires an intelligent strategy and sharp workflow. So, in this article, we show how to tailor a plan for large Jira Service Management projects to keep your customers satisfied and CSAT on the top level.

Top-level portal design: needs, target groups and roles

First, you need to focus on fundamentals like your target group, who your customers are, their needs, and your goals. What are other roles in workflow? Who else should you care for and take responsibility for under the loop? 

• Analysis of needs

Before you start designing the service desk portal, identify the organization's critical business and operational needs. What do you want to achieve through the portal? What are the main goals of the project? What are the KPIs? Of course, your goal will be to have as few tickets as possible and as fast a resolution as possible, but let’s keep this goal SMART. Spend a minute to define your goals and business objectives to learn what will be crucial in the following steps. 

• Target audience 

This one probably sounds cliche, but trust us - not every Organization knows the answer: Who are your customers? What is your audience? This means these people submit tickets and use the service desk portal for different request types. Don’t forget that the customer portal is for external usage and internal purposes like hardware and software logistics. Understanding who your users are will help customize the interface, request types, and features.

• Roles and permissions

Plan roles and permissions at the very early stage to avoid a lack of them or overwriting. If you do the second step, you will know precisely what groups you have and what permissions should be granted.  What are roles in Jira Service Management? 

• Administrators
• Agents
• Collaborators
• Customers
• Request Participant
• Stakeholders 

Source: Atlassian

Explore roles more wider here.

Service catalog design

Having fundamentals allows you to start designing your service catalog. At this stage, you will plan request types and how your customer portal should look like, taking into consideration your audience and business goals. 4 steps are ahead of you:

• Plan the catalog design

Start by identifying the roles and responsibilities. Determine who will manage the service catalog and who will define the service requirements. To ensure everything stays on track, it’s important to set clear timelines and expectations for the entire design process.

• Create the catalog structure

Begin by listing all the services your organization provides. Then, decide how customers will request these services through a self-service portal, email, or other channels. Organizing services into logical categories (like IT, HR, or Finance) will help users find and request the services they need more quickly.

• Establish workflows

After defining the services, set up the workflows. Configure the statuses, transitions, and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and assign teams to handle different types of requests. This will ensure that requests are processed efficiently and resolved within the expected timeframes.

• Maintain and improve the catalog

The service catalog should evolve as your organization grows. Regularly review and update the catalog to reflect any changes, whether adding new services, modifying existing ones, or phasing out services that are no longer needed.

Set up permissions for projects and request types 

Proper configuration of permissions is crucial to ensure security and efficiency. Determine who has access to create, modify, and close requests within a project.

Each role can have different permissions. For example, an administrator has the option to restrict access to a service project to those who have been added to it or to open it to any customer who joins the site, depending on the customer access restrictions set up at the site level by site admins. 

Additionally, they can decide whether to allow clients to share requests with all company members or those who can access the same service project.  

Limit visibility of request types 

Jira Service Management has features that allow admins to limit access for some users, organizations or groups to certain request types. Managing a large-scale service desk is helpful in ensuring that customers raise requests using the correct request types and that agents' queues are in order.

However, hiding request types can also be restricted based on other conditions: project roles, calendar or even JQL. This isn’t a native Jira Service Management solution, but you can achieve it with the Feature Bundle extension (Data Center). 

For example, you can restrict the visibility of internal request types like hardware requests only for your employees, and customers won’t see them - why should they? It can only make them confused - the simpler, the better :)  

Employees’ view

Customers’s view 

This add-on (in Cloud version) also allows you to set announcement banners for each request type or global help center to inform all customers at once about maintenance or important clues.

Set up agent teams and define measures

Configure agents teams according to their specializations and responsibilities. Those teams can be based on request types like Internal Help Center, Incident tickets, HR areas, or time zones, localizations, and other conditions that suit your workflow. 

Each team should have their success indicators and KPIs to monitor the effectiveness of teams. Those may be based on different SLAs (for example, average response time, request resolution time) or user satisfaction (CSAT). 

Monitor and analyze the metrics you set up to eliminate bottlenecks, allocate resources and agents efficiently, and detect overloaded agents.

Try out ITSM Reports (Cloud) to monitor those metrics! 

Run, analyze, improve & test

It’s time to run projects and the customer portal in a production environment if everything is prepared. Ensure your team is trained, has all technical support, and is ready for upcoming requests. 

If you need to move request types from testing to production, the Feature Bundle (Data Center) has a feature that imports and exports request types.

Don’t forget about constant data analyses! Regularly analyze request handling data using reports and dashboards in JSM. Track KPI performance and SLA fulfillment.

We can guarantee that everything will work smoothly the first time. There is plenty of time and space for improvement. Based on the data collected, identify areas for upgrades. This could include optimizing processes, adjusting the service catalog, or reallocating resources.

Regularly test new functionality, automation, and improvements in a test environment (sandboxes) before rolling them out to production. Avoid making “live” changes that may disrupt the portal.

With all those tips on managing large-scale service desk projects, you should avoid breached SLAs, red queues, offloaded agents, and frustrated customers. 

Ask your Jira administrator for Feature Bundle for Jira Service Management.