JIRA Advanced IT Service Management Template or not

[Andrew Ramsay]

I am in an enterprise organisation  requiring multi-vendor ITSM, and we are considering whether to adopt the Advanced IT Service Management template or use a partner to configure.

Who has experience with the template?  What was your experience? Any constraints versus doing a build with a partner.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andrew Ramsay and welcome to the Community!

As I am working for a partner, you may suspect that my opinion on the matter is biased. I'll happily leave that assessment up to you, but let me try to give you a shot at good advice ... 😅

To get a good first assessment of the template, I would suggest you just create a project based on the template for yourself. Preferably do so in your sandbox environment (which you should have if you are on a premium plan) or on a separate test environment. The template creates a lot of configuration items that - if you decide after review that the template is not really what you need - is pretty hard to clean up afterwards and leaves quite a bit of clutter in the admin section of your site. Have a look at the portal, at the queues in the agent interface and at the SLA settings and try to assess how well it matches your organisation's needs. If that looks good, go ahead with the template!

As a solution partner, though, we usually see that the template is pretty good to (very quickly) get a good idea of how you could set up a comprehensive IT Service Portal, a lot is missing or does not align with the specifics of your organisation. And let that be exactly what makes your ITSM solution successful or not. Most of the time we usually spend on an ITSM project is in defining the details of companies' service catalog, assets, automation, integration with dev teams and so on. If you come to the conclusion that the template has quite a bit of loopholes and you don't feel too confident on how to bridge those yourself, working with a partner to start off on the right foot is usually not a bad idea.

Hope this helps!

[Andrew Ramsay]

Brilliant! Thanks @Walter Buggenhout

Great advice and don't see bias at all!  That's why partners exist right!

My main concern is the agility you get with the template to evolve the design and configuration.  I would hate to have something work well for the first year and then have to reimplement because the template was too restrictive.  

I think on first assessment for service desk, incident, major incident, problem and change management it has all we need with minor configuration, which means that we can focus on new service request types, automation and asset/configuration.

Thanks
Andrew