Interview with an Expert: How Jóvin Jóvinsson wrangled an unruly service process with JSM
Creating a quick and efficient service process that spans multiple teams and disparate systems can be a true mind-bender. But Jóvin Jóvinsson did precisely that by tackling things one step at a time.
Prelude
Imagine that you've just relocated to a new city in a new country—just because you wanted the same sort of expat adventures your father, mother, and other siblings had done in their careers—and started a new job where you noticed a significant portion of customer feedback was focused primarily on a single key entrenched but ineffective service management process based on email.
You now have a partial picture of Jóvin Jóvinsson's life twenty-two months ago.
Backstory
"My Mother is from Australia; in her very early twenties, she did an incredibly unorthodox thing of traveling by herself in the 1970s to a remote and unusual place - Iceland, where my father is from. They met, and I believe that sowed the seeds of traveling and experiencing expat life in our genes," Jóvin told me during our interview.
His sisters had all lived in London, and his brothers in Iceland and Germany, with his father taking expat assignments in new and exotic (to him) destinations. Along the way, Jóvin developed a deep-rooted desire to follow a similar path one day. So, he studied computer science, got a master's in business administration, and started a career in tech.
These things aligned with his interests, and he believed his choices would afford him similar travel and expat opportunities. Eventually, he married and went to London with his wife. With his impressive educational credentials and work history, he landed a new job in five short weeks.
An unruly process
That job was with Clarion Events, one of the world's leading event organizers. The company has been producing and delivering innovative, market-leading events for a wide array of customers since 1947. Like many established and successful companies that have survived the test of time, Clarion Events had some established processes and procedures that needed fresh eyes and modern technology applied to them.
Enter Jóvin, their new Global Application Support Manager.
One of Jóvin's first assignments was to find ways to streamline the necessarily complex workflow associated with creating the necessary objects in the CRM that enable the sales process for large events. As you might imagine, a small army of professionals in fields ranging from sales to finance to legal to design and engineering (and more) is required.
Unfortunately, there were cases where the workflow and processes used by some of the teams involved took longer than expected—in a few cases, much too long. In contrast, the timeline aligned with expectations in many other cases.
But why?
As Jóvin investigated it with fresh, objective eyes, he quickly identified two likely culprits causing most of the delays.
For one thing, each team relied on its own systems to support its work, and for the most part, those systems didn't talk to one another. Moreover, each team had its own proven processes, but those processes might not align very well with adjacent processes. Each team was working in isolation.
The second likely culprit Jóvin discovered was that all the hand-offs and collaboration between teams happened via email. Critical information was scattered across numerous inboxes, and approval processes might be affected by planned or unexpected absences. Requesters had no visibility into these absences, and the absentee approvers had no way of knowing there was a new approval request waiting for them in their growing inbox. His investigation showed that these factors were the primary sources of bottlenecks and delays. Still, his experience and training taught him to tackle these issues first and save other needed but less impactful matters for later.
How to wrangle (an unruly process)
"One of the most impactful lessons I had in my career was during my time as an Operations Excellence Coach. I learned that iterative improvements could have immense power. My favorite example of this is evident when comparing Formula 1 in the 1950s to modern F1 teams," Jóvin explained. "In effect, they are applying Agile principles in areas far removed from software development."
He realized the same could be true for Clarion Events.
"I knew my stakeholders would be nervous about making major changes to their processes on a large scale," he told me. "But I was confident they'd be willing to embrace smaller changes addressed in a stepwise fashion."
He was right. His stakeholders appreciated his analysis and his recommended approach. One of his first steps was determining which of the company's existing systems should be used to establish a new approach. As Jóvin saw it, Salesforce and Jira were two strong possibilities.
The company already used Salesforce to define, create, and store customer-specific artifacts for event planning, such as sponsorship agreements and stand bookings at our events. It also used Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) to manage 'incidents.'
"It might seem unusual to have only one issue type — an 'incident' — for events management," said Jóvin. "But that was the only issue type in JSM when I joined the company during a period of transformation. Previously, there hadn't been enough administrative capacity to configure JSM properly, so I immediately set out to fix that so we could leverage its true power."
In the meantime, he kept hearing and learning more about JSM, and it occurred to him that the platform could enable and support many more of their processes.
"I had a proverbial 'Ah-ha!' moment," Jóvin told me. "We needed a way to visualize the various stages of event creation from a management system perspective and a deviation from email. JSM became my focus point, and I began to move the work through Customer Portals."
Working with his stakeholders, Jóvin built a POC with a complete service catalog of requests for each of the significant service request types—tax, legal, etc. Each request used the right/best issue types for the work at hand. He also built workflows to manage the flow of tickets and approvals in a much more visible way.
With reporting, he created signals and alerts for delayed items to eliminate and reduce bottlenecks (by making delays more visible) so alternatives could be found more quickly.
That POC is in the rearview mirror now, and with his iterative approach, he's eliminated nearly all the bottlenecks and major delays. His stakeholders are well-informed now, and it's easy for them to act when unexpected delays happen.
These days, he's turning his sights towards expanding the practice of Service Management through JSM to other business units, including the People and Marketing Operations teams. Onboarding of these teams is the kickoff of his efforts to transition the company from ITSM to ESM, where “...Jira Service Management can genuinely come to life as more teams collaborate on work in a centralized platform — reducing the pivoting of data from system to email, to system.”
"JSM is a wonderfully powerful service management platform thanks to its flexibility. We use it to enhance and enforce the best practices needed to streamline our work across the business."
- Jóvin Jóvinsson
When asked what advice he has to offer others when they embark on a similar JSM journey, he shared the following.
"I highly recommend building a peer network through the Atlassian Community in its online and local (ACE) chapters. One can learn a great deal from those who share similar challenges and use similar solutions."
Then, after pausing briefly, he offered some bonus advice.
"Use Atlassian Guard. However, don't cut corners when implementing it. Do some deep thinking before you turn it on, and take full advantage of the first free month to discover what you didn't know. You may find many previously unknown 'shadow instances' of Atlassian products in your organization. You'll want to get that under control before your free thirty days fly by."
The aftermath
Professionally, Jóvin is studying ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value, his fourth ITIL certification on his path to ITIL 4 Master.
On the home front, Jóvin and his wife love life in and around London and are busy exploring the area's history, culture, food scene, and everything else their expat life offers. Jóvin has even found time to work on his game development skills: He's trying to create a facsimile of one of his favorite computer games 'for the learning experience.'
Have questions for Jóvin? Go ahead and ask them in the comments below. Or, if you're lucky enough to live and work in London, like Jóvin, you can also look for him at an upcoming London ACE events 🇬🇧
One final comment from the author
Do you have experience creating impactful service management solutions
with Jira Service Management, like Jóvin?
This is only the first of a series of articles I am writing based on interviews with experts like Jóvin. I plan to publish one monthly (more or less) for as long as I have people to interview.
Check out this community discussion for more information if you want to participate.
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Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_
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Atlassian (Online) Community Leader
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