New to Jira Service Desk? Need a gentle push to get underway? Then maybe you’ve stumbled into the right place. Jira Service Desk is an awesome application that can help you and your team be more productive while being fun to use at the same time. For some, getting started can be a bit intimidating. This is especially true if Jira Service Desk is your first exposure to Atlassian products.
In this brief article I am going to share some things to consider when getting started. Hopefully, my experiences, successes and missteps will help you in the initial leg of your journey.
One final note before we begin, I want to give a big shout out to my Community peers. Much of what you will read here I picked up from them along the. And on that note, let’s jump right in.
Begin at the Beginning
As with most all things techy you are going to be faced with new terminology. Taking some time to learn the basics up front will serve you well both in setting up your projects and more importantly communicating with others in the Community. Manon Soubies-Camy recently made reference to this brief but useful Jira Service Desk glossary that I had never come across before. Most of the terms in that reference are specific to Jira Service Desk. It is particularly important to learn the differences between the user roles (admin, agent, customer and collaborator). In addition to these unique terms it helps to decipher some fundamental Jira Core terms as they apply to Jira Service Desk as well. Borrowing from a well written reference (Your Go-To Jira Glossary) here are a few you should find useful:
Down the Rabbit Hole
Now that you have some terminology under your belt it’s time to set up your service desk and create your first project if you haven’t done so already. Create a test project where you can play and explore, make mistakes and learn from them. Start with a basic project and workflow, create some issues, transition them, assign them, etc. There is no better place to start in my opinion than with Atlassian’s Get started with Jira Service Desk guide. It does a great job of walking your through step-by-step.
I’m Late I’m Late
While the SLA (Service Level Agreement) term was shared above in the glossary link, I wanted to single this out as it is a very important component of Jira Service desk. Moreover, it may not be intuitively obvious how to set them up and decipher them. I recommend you start with the article Setting up SLAs and once you have read it thru just give it a try. Twisting one of Aristotle’s quotes into simple terms – you learn more by doing. With that said here are a few things to know:
Automation
Soon after or even during your study on SLAs you will stumble upon Automation. While wholly separate, Automation will take your SLAs to the next level. Take a peek at Automating your service desk for a quick glimpse at how it can help. Of course, Automation is in no way limited to SLAs. You will find canned SLAs that you can leverage and edit to meet your needs, or you can create a custom rule leveraging various events and JQL to accomplish all sorts of tasks. One word of caution, and this applies to anywhere automation is used in our lives – It will break! Automation relies on specific conditions and invariably you or another admin will make a change one day and something will break. Takeaway – if you see something broken that was working before always have a look at your automation rules for a possible clue.
Waiting by the Little Door
Jira Service Desk introduces queues into the Jira world. If you peel back the covers Queues are really just filters with a few new twists. With that being said they are the way agents get things done for most users of Jira Service Desk. Here are how the queues are defined for my IT Helpdesk project in case others can benefit.
Issues by email
If you are adding Jira Service Desk to your Jira Software, you may quickly become confused with setting up the email channel to allow customers to create issues via email. Don’t be confused into thinking that you leverage Jira Software’s email channel configuration. Jira Service desk has its own method of setting up email request for each project. For details on how to setup your project to support email request please see Receiving requests by email.
Some final words
I hope that this article will prove beneficial as you begin standing up your first or next Jira Service Desk project. Thanks for taking the time to see your way to the end.
See you all in the Community,
Jack-
Jack Brickey
EVP Engineering & IT
RTP, NC
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