Suggestions for letting business users work in the ServiceDesk

[Stian Bentsen Sveen]

Hi!

Today we use JIRA for projects and ServiceDesk for IT Support.

This is just internally in our business, so our "customers" are only internally.

Certain business users have access to certain software projects but the ServiceDesk is only for IT.

We use a custom field called "Assignment Group" which contains all the competency groups in IT as a way of assigning a ticket to a "group" and then letting them handle assigning tickets internally in that group (Infrastructure, NetSec, Local support UK / NO / etc).

We see that many systems require support and handling by business users as they are not incidents / requests about the systems themselves, but functionality / data within these systems, which is not something we in IT have competency for.

We dont want these business users to see the IT support tickets as they can sometimes contain sensitive data from the user and they should only be view-able by IT staff, but at the same time we want to assign tickets to these business users if its something they should typically handle.

Today we just redirect the users to "talk with someone in HR / Finance / CS" etc, which is not very user friendly and we want a single point of contact for our users.

So all incoming incidents / requests would still go through our global service desk, but they would have the option to assign tickets to the business super users if they - after classification of the ticket - finds out this is a business issue, not an IT issue.

What would be the best way to allow this?

We've brainstormed a few scenarios:

1. Allow them access into our servicedesk, create assignment groups for each business area (Business: Finance, Business: HR etc) so we can assign tickets to that competency group and then use issue security to say that they can only see issues with "their" assignment group based on a jira access group (if this is even possible),
2. Create a separate service desk for all business systems and then create different issue types for each business system and say create a group for each competency group and say that f.ex JIRA-Access-BusinessFinance will get access to all issue types they support by using issue security and limit them to the issue types they support.
3. Create separate SD's for each business area, f.ex Finance Systems Support, HR Systems Support etc and then just have jira groups for access to each service desk (would be the easiest to control access to out of the 3 options we've come up with).

Are any of these actually good options or is there a better way to do this?

It has to be a service desk so the business super users can communicate with the customer.

[Sharon Tan · Accepted solution]

Hey Stian,

All 3 options are valid out of the box if you're open to licensing your business users as Jira Service Desk agents as well :)

If your Jira Service Desk instance is on the same server/Cloud site as your Jira instance for your business users (Jira Core or Jira Software), then you would have shared user management and could allow Jira Core business users to function as internal collaborators on Jira Service Desk issues without having to license them as a Jira Service Desk agent. See involving Jira Software or Jira Core users for how to add them.

This means that you could certainly choose to include your business users within an assignment group and grant permissions by group, or use issue-level security and include business users on Jira Service Desk issues on an issue-by-issue basis.

Then, you can allow your Jira Service Desk users to internally comment on Jira Service Desk issues. Since you'd like to allow your business users to occasionally respond to customers, a Jira Service Desk agent can add a Jira Core business user as a request participant in order to communicate directly with the customer if the issue is actually functionality/data rather than a bug.

This way, your Jira Service Desk agent still facilitates the interaction with the end user. This best practice is outlined on our page on collaborating with other Jira teams on Jira Service Desk issues. 

[Stian Bentsen Sveen]

Hi Sharon,

Thanks for the reply!

We went with adding them as full agents in our existing service desk since we want them to handle communication with the customer themselves and also be able to easily move tickets between IT and the business "support" users.

I setup different security levels (IT, HR and Finance) and created different security groups in AD that is synced to JIRA that gives access to each one. IT will have access to all security levels and HR / Finance will only have access to tickets with their respective security level.

We use a custom field called "Assignment Group" containing all different departments in IT and just added HR and Finance as values to that field. Then we use the JIRA automation add-on to automatically change security level based on which assignment group is set.

Assignment Group not in ("HR","Finance") will get security level IT and HR / Finance assignment group will set their respective security level. The default security level is IT so all new tickets go to our global servicedesk who classify the ticket and then forward it to the correct department.

Then we created a dashboard for both departments where they can see all unassigned issues with their assignment group + an "assigned to me" gadget. This works pretty well now :)

Br,

Stian