How do you effectively manage a service desk with jira service management?

[Phillip C]

I've been using Jira Service Management for a while now and what I fail to still understand is how a service desk team can effectively be managed on the platform?

I would like to know how other teams:

1. Effectively manage time for agents: How are you able to manage the tickets for multiple agents working in a JSM project?
2. Determine work spent on tickets: How are you measuring time taken and agents working on tickets?
3. Overall issue management: How are you able to ensure tickets are worked on in a logical order?
4. What automation do you find to be most valuable? simple to advanced automation rules.
5. How do you monitor and improve performance? Reports and dashboards usage.

I'm not looking for addon marketplace app sales people to bombard me with offerings, i'm looking for real world people providing info and evidence on how companies manage a service desk with JSM.

Would love feedback on any or all of the questions above from real service desk users.

[Stefaan Boes]

Hi Phillip, thanks for lighting the fire, let's see what we can learn from our peers.  This is for sure not an easy question and I am looking forward to hear about other ideas and strategy.
Here are my comments to start with:

1. We are using Kanban boards for our Service Desk agents (which does more or less the same as tickets queues, but in more visible way.  These Kanban boards are divided in columns, representing the ticket states (in progress, resolved, ...), and in horizontal lanes, representing the priority of each ticket (blocker, critical, major, ...).  There are also various filter options on the board (e.g. escalated tickets, own tickets, 1st line, 2nd line, ...
We then agreed with the Service Desk team:

• There is a limit on the number of tickets in their own "in progress"  column. This should result in a faster flow to the ticket resolution.
• When they start working on a new ticket, it is always the highest in priority and the least available SLA time remaining.
• We maintain a schedule for an "incident responder" role, to keep an eye on the incoming ticket queue (fast response to emergencies, reach out to their colleagues in case of high volumes, ....)
• That's it basically.  As the team lead I don't try to intervene much, but need to follow up regularly to keep things on track.

2. Each agent should log his/her time spent to each ticket in the worklog.  We are using the Tempo-plugin to provide us an overview about this time registration.  Besides of this we keep also a weekly track on the average number of tickets resolved per agent per day.

3. I don't have a solution for that.  It happens regularly that agents prefer to pick the easy tickets out of the queue.  This behavior is then discussed during team meetings: "if you want to move forward in your career, you also need to be able to choose for the hot potatoes sometimes ;-)".  
SLA timers will help for sure, but this doesn't prevent the above situation.

4. As the team lead or incident manager: receiving an email automatically for blocker or critical tickets.  So it should be less difficult to overlook them, and you are at least aware that something is going on.

5. Publish the weekly Service Desk statistics of the team: tickets resolved, time logged.
Having (bi)weekly one-on-one meetings to hear what they struggle with, how we can improve things, how we can automate.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.