Michiel Schuijer: Jira Service Desk across different teams + geographies

[#1]

The Jira Service Desk team is looking for and sharing stories from teams using the tool for innovative use cases in HR, Legal, Finance, Marketing, etc. in order to help traditional users (IT admins) help other departments take advantage of the product. In this post, you’ll learn how @Michiel Schuijer, Expert Application Engineer at TomTom, supports Jira Service Desk instances across many different teams and geographies. 

What is your role at TomTom International?

My official title is Expert Application Engineer. My role means that I am the ‘go-to-guy’, aka application configuration expert, in the Amsterdam and Eindhoven offices. I also sometimes support other offices like Belgium and the rest of Europe or even the world as we have offices everywhere, but I have colleagues to help me that are based in India and Poland. Employees can reach out to me to discuss what Jira/Confluence are and what they can do to best use it. As my colleagues in India often do the ‘groundwork’, I am diving more deeply into rolling out projects that rely heavily on Scrum/Kanban and teams who want to use Portfolio and also Service Desk (this week I rolled out the Jira Service Desk for our HR team!). 

Another part of my role is to signal weak points, advise on how to strengthen our team, improve the applications (mostly configuration) and see where I can get people to make the most of the applications my team manages and supports and wherever possible get rid of double/overlapping software or integrate those if really required. I discuss this with Miro Capka, our Technical Account Manager (TAM), on a monthly basis if we can find the time.

Main focus for Jira: Portfolio, Service Desk, Salesforce connector (ServiceRocket), BigPicture (going for training in a couple of weeks in Poland).

What non-technical teams at TomTom use Jira Service Desk, and how? 

We at TomTom International are using (JIRA Software Server DC-edition) with Service Desk for:

Purchasing: currently one project for a team that handles the internal purchasing process that used to be all email and part SAP. The project is using a lot of custom fields but has only one request type for the customers and 2 additional issue types (Task and Sub-task) to be used for the agents internally among each other.

Device Management: a project for requesting a loan device for developers to test apps/programming on (mainly navigation devices, but can be any mobile device since the apps can run almost anywhere). Some straight-forward request types to 'request a device for loan' and 're-assign a device' (to re-assign a borrowed device to someone else).

External company desks: we have several service desk projects for various external customers/partners we work with so they can report issues or make requests for non-IT related matters. Map related and such.

HR service portal: a service desk that is currently being developed for HR to receive requests and questions that used to go via email. This is still under construction.

How does JSD spread around the organization? What are some challenges you hear about with onboarding new non-IT teams?

In some cases, we did not have a good way to share information about bugs/issues/services and therefore abused Jira project with additional security. Now, we want to slowly but steadily replace these with service desks where possible. So far we have started 6 SD’s in about a year now and by the end of this year possibly up to 10. We try to keep it for small teams only because licenses can get costly.

All TomTom employees will be using that SD (“OTS Service Portal”) for all requests to my parent department for anything from ‘printer is broken’, ‘facilities request’ to ‘VM deployment fails’ and ‘F5 load balancer service request’. OTS is comprised of ‘Employee IT, Enterprise IT, Commercial IT, Facilities, Real Estate and more’.