How do you onboard new employees using Jira Service Desk?

[Amaresh Ray]

Hello Community 👋,

I'm a product manager on JSD. 

If you're responsible for onboarding employees, I'd like to speak to you to learn about the range of tasks that are involved in setting up new hires.

I'd love to learn what some of the major frustrations and challenges are with your current workflow.

Thanks!

Amaresh

[Jack Brickey]

Hi Amaresh! I have used JSD for staffing which covers search, interviewing, offer, etc. then I have used JSW for the Onboarding actions. Happy to chat if you think it would be useful.

[Amaresh Ray]

Hi @Jack Brickey ! That's awesome - I would love to chat with you. It doesn't look like I can send you a message here, so would you be able to send an email to amaresh.ray [at] atlassian.com with your availability? 

[Joseph Winkelbauer]

Is there a good beginner document for this somewhere?

[Amaresh Ray]

@Joseph Winkelbauer  – Could you tell us a little bit more about what you're looking to accomplish?

[Peter Hamilton-Harding]

Hi Amaresh,

We currently receive onboard requests as 'Service Request with Approvals', most details in a PDF. We have been intending for a long time to make a custom issue type including all the PDF fields so HR can log details direct, but simply haven't got around to it. Would definitely be interested if there was a preconfigured issue type/workflow available.

We are also using Crowd to sync multiple directories and make them available to other Atlassian Products. Apologies if something like this exists directly, but it would be great to be able to write directly to e.g. Active Directory from pre-configured fields in a Service Request...

Kind Regards,
Peter

[Ben Hart]

We currently use Google Forms to capture all the Information from HR and also the New Hire for on-boarding, the responses get sent directly to JSD which is the start of our onboarding workflow.

I would rather use a Form in JSD directly, however, we need the functionality of having Questions based on responses (not supported in Jira without expensive purchasing 3rd party add-ons).

Happy to chat if interested

[Amaresh Ray]

@Ben Hart  I'd love to chat to you to better understand your workflow and your needs :) 

Would you mind sending an email to amaresh.ray [at] atlassian.com with your availability? 

[quyen]

@Amaresh Ray @Ben Hart Would you be wiling to share the Google Form you created to onboard new hires? I'm starting to look into this for my company and would love to see what others have done. Thanks

[Ignacio Pena]

@Ben Hart Same here! Please let me know if you're willing to share this info, it would be extremely helpful. 

[Ben Hart]

@Ignacio Pena @quyen 

You can view the forms here.

Manager Checklist - https://forms.gle/U4JcwTYKuTbEP1bp6

Employee Preferences - https://forms.gle/LszDns8kAvxbUanQ8

The responses are sent to our ServiceDesk using, Email Notifications for Google Forms - G Suite Marketplace.

[quyen]

@Ben Hart Thank you very much!

[Shawn Masters]

I am actively working on this now...my company used to use a PDF attached to tickets. So i converted that into a ticket type with custom fields for each of the required pieces of information. 

We then built out Department specific Employee change forms in the customer portal which exposes fields that are needed for each department...allowing the SD to have 1 single ticket type for ALL change requests. 

We then used the Jira Issue collector to embed the forms into the companies Sharepoint Intranet so end users wouldnt have to log into Jira. 

[Amaresh Ray]

@Shawn Masters who fills out the ticket? Is it typically the hiring manager for each department? What does the workflow look like once the ticket is submitted to the new hire starting? 

[Shawn Masters]

Correct, a manager from each department fills out the tickets. 

Workflow:

1. Validate ticket info
2. Create AD / base accounts
3. Transition the ticket to the next Status; based on on fields used in the ticket linked issues are created to handle things like accesses to development environments, hardware deployed to the desk,  etc
4. The ticket waits for the linked issues to be Done then transitions to a review stage for Tier 1.
5. Once Reviewed Tier 1 moves the user to "Active User" in the workflow. 
   
   Any new requests that come in are linked to this master ticket so we can track all permissions, hardware, etc (we are required to maintain auditable records)
   
   When an Off roll is received for that user; the workflow has another tree that goes through the process of revoking access and cleaning up data/hardware.

One of the things we really would like to see introduced are Dynamic fields..so that we dont have to maintain 10 different forms in the customer portal. We have seen some 3rd party tools for it but have not been able to get approval for them because our management feels Atlassian should provide such a useful feature as part of the product. 

[Mark Hostetler]

Hey Amaresh,

My team is working on creating a new user addition system. One of the things we've haven't made a decision yet on is whether for onboarding to be its own project or not. We have projects for internal development team and external support, and don't super want to create any more projects than necessary. I couldn't speak to how it would work exactly, but seems like since onboarding is pretty foundational to most teams it could have its own 'space' in jira that isn't necessarily a silo'd project.

Anyways, some of the major steps:

1. Setup laptop, any other hardware for users
2. Key card access to the building
3. Setup Desk Phone
4. Setup Email
5. Assign to Email Distribution Lists
6. Setup VPN Credentials
7. Set up Active Directory
8. Grant access to the 3rd party tools each team use's(this usually takes a while as we forget which all tools we use sometimes)
9. Adding them to the weekly meetings their team(s) have in the calendar
10. We don't have a huge HR team here, but triggering esignature for documents could be a useful tool? I dunno if there are plug in's out there for that right now

Thats all I can think of atm

[Amaresh Ray]

@Mark Hostetler What projects do IT requests come into? It might be worth re-using that project? 

What all other tools do you interact with as part of going through all these steps? I'm thinking AD, Office365, perhaps there are others? If you had a magic wand, which of these steps would you like to automate? 

[Todd Thomas]

We just went live with Jira Service Desk less than 2 weeks ago, so on-boarding employees into JSD is fresh on my mind because we just did it for 150+ staff people!

@Amaresh Ray, I'd be happy to talk through what we've done to be successful as well as some of our pain points via Zoom. Just let me know if this would be helpful.

[Amaresh Ray]

Hi @Todd Thomas -- this would be super helpful! I was looking to understand the different things involved in onboarding new employees in general and where JSD fits into that workflow - but I would also love to learn how you onboarded your staff onto JSD. Would you be able to send an email to amaresh.ray [at] atlassian.com with your availability? 

[Charles Miller]

Hello Thomas, I can see that this was posted several months ago, but I would definitely be interested in talking to about what you did. If you are still available for this, please let me know. 

[Todd Thomas]

I'll summarize what we did to help on-board staff:

• We met with each of our IT departments to understand their needs. In particular, what changes, deletions, or additions would be needed to our existing catalog of service requests. We also took that time to show them how JSD works.
• We created an extensive documentation and shared that with them on how to use JSD. While this took a lot of time to create, very few people took the time to read it. It was helpful, however, in helping us determine all of the different steps we needed to do to get feature parity with our old system, so the big win here was more for us than everyone else.
• We held a couple open lab sessions people could join where we walked them through some critical parts (getting access, logging in, configuring notifications, etc.). Then we had time at the end as an open lab to answer questions and identify other things that might still need to be done.
• I recorded a video of the same presentation that was given during the open lab time for those who were unable to attend or wanted to re-watch/review.
• We communicated via email prior to and just after the migration so everyone knew about the timeline, the status, and after the system was up and running.

It was a big effort from our team, but going live was very successful. Our biggest obstacles related to data migration due to the old system and the way the JSD API functions, but I'm proud of what we accomplished and really enjoy the improved functionality JSD provides.

[Charles Miller]

Thank you Todd, it sounds like you were very thorough on you preparing and implementation. I would be interested to know how you implemented onboading within Jira. 

I have an issue where I created a form that has all the needed components and custom fields, my intention was for HR to create a request, this would then go in the IT queue and we could share with future employees supervisor and finally IT would complete the request with user details. The problem I am experiencing is that if HR does not complete some fields, they do not show up as fields to be completed when the manager receives the request. Did you have a similar problem? If so, how did you get around it?

[Todd Thomas]

Charles-

Unfortunately, I don't have much advice to lend as the scope of our implementation was for IT only. I'm not really clear if HR is intentionally or unintentionally leaving some of those fields blank. If it was unintentional, you should be able to mark them as required in the portal. If it's intentional because of a lack of data/info, this might be more of a business process change than an issue with JSD.

If you still need more help with this, I'd recommend creating a separate post about it in the community and describe that process a bit more. One thing I've learned is that JSD is very configurable and extendable if you're willing to look at the Marketplace. We use ProForma for some of our more complex forms. It works well, though there are some limitations we'd love to see changed, too.

[Jonathon Renshaw]

Hi @Amaresh Ray ,

I'm currently testing Jira Service Desk cloud to build our Service Desk but am struggling to set up a ticket work flow for 'New Employee' requests that would come from HR to IT.

Is this something you could me assist with?

Sorry, Found that I was using the External ITSD template instead of the Internal ITSD Template 

Kind Regards, 

Jonathon

[Brendan Burke]

I am struggling with the same thing.  How were you able to overcome the challenge? 

Thanks

Brendan 

[Jonathon Renshaw]

Hi @Brendan Burke , 

I had to start a new service desk using New Project in the top right, and then select Internal Service Desk template (looks like its been renamed to General Service Desk) 

Once created from that template, there were Ticket Types for Employee Onboarding, where you can modify the workflow and forms. 

Hope this helps, 

[eric.gardner]

I am curious to see if this is still being researched by you? I was tasked with building a JSD workflow for onboarding and I wanted to see how this would be accomplished in the following scenario

Goal is:

• Some kind of trigger to or ticket creation ideally with Confluence where HR can enter a multiple choice form:

  • New Hire: Jacqeuline Johnson - FTE -  Media Sales - Toronto
  • Sub ticket/task created for HR to prep their onboarding documentation based off of the FTE/Contractor status
  • Sub ticket/task created to create Okta user account with birthright accounts
  • Sub ticket/task created for non-birthright apps
  • Sub ticket/task created to add user to specific Gsuite groups
  • Sub ticket/task for people team to prepare their new hire stuff for the new person and work on scheduling.
  
  

  This is going to need to be triggered by the originating ticket.

  I would like to chat more with you about this!
  
  
  

[Sarah Catania]

Hi Amaresh

My team is currently working through an onboarding process for new people into our Unit.

We work for state government, so the initial onboarding is handled by our Department's HR team and the Corporate IT teams. Bringing someone into our team requires that they have this initial setup complete to obtain an SOE (individual network login to the Department's systems), then they will need extra access and accounts to access our separate networked system.

Sounds strange that we have a separate network, I know, however we work for a Department that runs the Emergency Management applications, so having a separate network guarantees that we can manage it separately and avoid any impact when the Corporate IT systems are down or have major changes occurring during peak seasons.

For our systems, as I said, we require the SOE to be created, then we have several applications and groups that people are added to in a vast range of applications.

We don't have Single Signon yet which means we have to manage each login role and access individually for the most part.

We are currently pulling all of this together to make sense of it, and then we'll start to build a workflow - likely very manual to begin with, then with the view to automate ticket creation for each individually required login/access, especially for those that require approvals.

We already have an approval process and we use JIRA Service Desk as a tool to handle these, albeit a semi-automatic process due to the staff changes that continue to occur at our approver level.

I am interested to know how far along you are with your research and producing a workflow that can be used as a template for onboarding.

Regards

Sarah

[Will Seay]

Hi amaresh,

We are just getting started with Jira Service Desk.  One of my next goals is to improve our newhire, position change, and employment termination procedures.  For now I'm using a simple "Request with Approvals" ticket type but ultimately I'd like to have a form that our HR team uses to onboard a new employee that gathers all the required info (name, manager, start date, equipment needed, etc) and then automation in Jira creates a parent Request ticket that contains subtasks assigned to specific individuals who handle specific things.  Or at least that's what I'm envisioning so that each technician has a clear assignment of work but HR or IT management can see where we are with any given onboarding request by looking in one place (ie: the parent Request).

If you are still working on this project, I'm available most weekdays in Zoom.

[Jay Stern]

Hi Will

I'm just starting to look at this for the company I have recently joined. 

Are you still available to give advice on this?

[Will Seay]

Amaresh is the product manager at Atlassian but not sure if he's still monitoring this thread.  The only solution I've found for the automation I'm looking for is via third party addons (read $, nonstarter for my smaller company).