What’s new in Jira Service Desk Cloud [November 2019 edition]

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G’day Jira Service Desk community!

It’s been a big year and we have lots to share. 

We’re planning to give you a comprehensive update each quarter about the investments we’re making in Jira Service Desk’s ITSM capabilities.  Over the coming 6-12 months we’ll be investing in several key ITIL processes: incident management, change management, problem management, and request management.   

Kicking off our first quarterly update for Atlassian’s ITSM solution, we’ve been up to a lot and want to share all the latest features. 

New business templates for HR, facilities and legal teams

To support this growing discipline of enterprise service management (ESM), we’re introducing new templates and workflows in Jira Service Desk that are purpose-built for business teams in HR, legal, and facilities. We realized that business teams were having the same service management challenges as their IT peers. By releasing out-of-the-box request types for your HR, facilities and legal teams, we aim to make it easier to get those teams up and running with their very own service desk. This will help reduce the dependency on IT, allowing business teams can manage their own project setup and changes using the new next-gen experience. Next-gen is a new project setup interface available to some Jira Service Desk customers that makes it easier to set up and configure projects (more information on next-gen below). Let's take a look at what's new:

HR teams can provide consistent onboarding experiences for employees

Facilities teams can provide a common place to submit maintenance requests

Legal teams can automate contract duties with a legal template

Try them for yourself in next-gen by typing in [yourinstancename]/jsd-next-gen or read about how to set them up here. 

The next-generation experience

Earlier this year, we released the next generation of Jira Service Desk (also known as next-gen) which is designed to make project setup and administration even easier. Next-gen projects help teams manage their own changes, without relying on IT. Next-gen also just launched language support to allow more flexibility when communicating with help seekers in multiple languages. Visit this page to learn more about next-gen capability. 

Add asset management apps to next-gen

For customers using the next-gen version, you can now access leading marketplace apps including Device42, Reftab, and Insight by Riada to track issues with full asset context.

Read more about asset management updates here.

Explore the marketplace within your project

Speaking of integrations, you can now explore and add on marketplace apps without leaving your Jira Service Desk instance. Head to project settings in the navigation and click on the new Apps tab. 

Try next-gen for yourself by heading to [yourinstancename]/jsd-next-gen 

Approve employee requests on the go

We’ve made improvements to how approvals work in the new issue view [shown below]. Requesting approval for a new device or gaining access to a system is much easier when it can be tracked and approved in a Jira Service Desk ticket.  

For managers on the go, you can approve via the Jira mobile app. UPDATE: Approvals are now here for next-gen. [Updated Jan 20th, 2020]

Read more here.

How to stay updated on our future product updates

We’ve created a new home for all our product updates, making it easier for you to read about all the updates in one place. We’ll also be hosting a quarterly webinar to walk you through the latest and give you insight into what’s coming next. If you missed the recent one, you can listen to the recording here. Otherwise, please join our next webinar in February 2020. 

Visit Jira Service Desk’s ‘What’s new’

Q&A with our Jira Service Desk PM’s 

If you’re keen to understand more about anything mentioned here, please post a question below and Jason and Christophe from our PM team will get back to you!

@Jason D_Cruz 

Senior Product Manager, Jira Service Desk

Jason recently lead the development of the ESM templates, enabling HR, facilities and legal teams to provide consistent service. 

@Christophe 

Principal Product Manager

Christophe leads the product development for next-gen, helping organizations get up and running quickly with a service desk.  

New Resources

• You can learn about ITSM best practices here at our new microsite: atlassian.com/itsm 

[Gavin Joye]

I am looking to build out the HR workflows in Jira Service Desk Cloud and am having trouble finding a solution. The onboarding workflow needs to be able to automatically create subtasks for other parties responsible for onboarding of a new employee based on a status or transition.

For example, when I have new employee coming on, they will need a name plate for the desk and business cards, possibly a credit card, software/licensing that a specific person controls outside the normal IT setup, and other items.  This means I need 4-5 users working on this ticket at the same time between Finance, Facilities, IT and other departments.  I can't pass assignment from one to another as it transitions statuses because when one person slacks off, it delays everything.

We also need notifications to be able to go out when the ticket hits specific states.  Once the email account, AD account and title have been setup, another department needs to know that info (but they don't need a subtask, just a notification with specific variable data).

I haven't seen these capabilities built-in, so I'm wondering if this will be built into it eventually or if I need to dive into the marketplace.  If the marketplace, do you know of any that should be able to handle this?

We hire more people nearly every week, so this is really important to build.  We currently use Sharepoint for it. 

Thank you.

Also, a side note and does not have to be addressed here: it would be great if there was a toggle switch variable that would be set to "1" so that when the ticket transitioned to a trigger status that creates all the subtasks and notifications, it would then set the toggle variable to "0" so that if the ticket returned to the trigger status, it would not recreate all of the subtasks and notifications.
I know that this could be avoided by not allowing transitioning back to that state, but having toggle switch variables (using rules) has been helpful in other applications outside of Jira.

[Paul Madison]

Gavin, you'll have to modify the workflows and create automations to make those things happen.