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Service desk and kanban environment setup

Deleted user February 2, 2018

Hi everybody. We are a digital agency. We're setting up Jira Service Desk + Jira Software (cloud).

The needs are:

1. every client/customer needs a dedicated portal where put their requests;

2. we will work on these requests internally with a kanban method. So every request comes from outside (through the Service Desk) and then the team decide how to work on it, passing through the columns of the kanban, for example todo, doing, done;

How to achieve this workflow? Currently, we are doing as follows:

- every client is a service desk project

- there's then another project, kanban type

The risk is to fill very fast the kanban of the agency.

But the alternative is, I think, for every client create two projects (one service desk and one kanban). Right?

 

Thank you very much!

2 comments

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 6, 2018

Since Service Desk does not contain boards, this isn't exactly how it was designed for Agents to work on issues.  You can still do it this way, however to have these users each using Service Desk and a Kanban board, each user has to be license for both applications.   Just something to be aware of.   With Service Desk Agents are typically more focused on the queues.

Could you explain in more detail why each client/customer requires a separate project?

I ask because creating a new project on a per customer basis could be really problematic with a large or growing customer base.  It might be ok to do this with say 10 - 20 projects or less.  However, Jira isn't really designed to handle thousands or tens of thousands of projects on a single instance.   When you create a project there are lots of other implications when you do this in regards to the number of workflows, screens, custom fields, and other scheme configurations that can be directly associated with each project created.   Having lots of these does not usually help performance.  Also having this many projects can make managing all these projects in your instance really difficult and time consuming.

Typically I think of a project as a specific location to focus on a group of issues that relate to a specific theme.   For example, Atlassian uses our public bug tracker, https://jira.atlassian.com/projects/ as a means to track issues on a per product basis and frequently also on a per platform basis as well (JRASERVER for Jira Core Server, and JSDCLOUD for Jira Service Desk Cloud, or CONFSERVER for Confluence Server for examples).    Each project in Jira can be configured to have its own permission, notification, screen, workflow, field configurations, custom fields, reporting etc.   If you do not actually need to have different settings for these sections for each customer, it doesn't really make sense to create separate projects for them.

Also with Service Desk, you don't have to worry about users in the customer role being able to see other users requests.  Service Desk has it's own issue security scheme applied that restricts issues to only the reporter and users in the JSD Agent role.  Since your customers should not typically be Agents, this helps restrict each individual ticket to the user that created it.  That reporter can choose to share their issue with other requested participants or members of an organization, but customers can't search Jira the way that Agents or licensed users can.  

The other problem is that having vastly different workflows across projects would be possible in your purposed setup.  However when you create the kanban board, unless all the projects are using the same workflow, the board configuration might be required to be much more complex in regards to the number of different statuses and the columns that need to correspond to each of the possible statuses.  Otherwise you might not be able to execute a specific transition for a issue when using that board.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.   Perhaps if we can understand the use case better we can offer you more precise suggestions.

Regards,

Andy

Deleted user February 6, 2018

Andy, I really appreciate your answer. So, thank you very much. Really. I understood your point of you. My vision about the setup needs important adjustments. Let’s step backward. My needs: I need to collect requests from different customers. On each customer request there is an involved team on my colleagues. I need to collect these requests from outside and assign them to inside (so my colleagues). So customer fill the request creation form, I qualify the request, and assign it to different people. Colleagues work on issues in a kanban style: to do, doing, done. Done means I can deliver results to the customer.

Colleagues are from three business areas: ux, development, advertising. Each business area has its people.

Based on this vision, your suggestion is to have one single project for the entire agency?

Thank you for your precious time.

Deleted user February 6, 2018

Also, we are trying to uniform project management across all our business areas. So this procedure needs to be as simple al possible: to do, doing, done are statuses shareable across all these business areas.

Deleted user February 6, 2018

Maybe your suggestion will be: one service desk project to collect issues -> one kanban project to work on issues. So two projects in total for all customers. Could be?

Deleted user February 7, 2018

Sorry for the multiple replies. Surfing the Community, I've discovered this post. It's out dated but the needs are the same: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-questions/How-do-I-setup-JIRA-Service-Desk-Want-one-centralised-support/qaq-p/49134

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 8, 2018

Ok, I think I understand the setup you are looking to create here a bit better now.

I still do not like the idea of a separate project on a per customer/client basis.  You could technically do this, but I don't think it scales very well.   So let's start with the single project idea and if we have to we can create other projects as needed.  The problem I see with using a single project now, is that you will be assigning these issues to your team members, that these other colleagues of yours are not expected to interact at all with the customers from what I see.  If that is the case, it's probably better to have at least 2 projects: 1 Service Desk project, and 1 Software project.

The reason I say this is that with JSD you are charged on a per agent basis.  Agents are the users that interact with your customers directly.  Unless you are expecting each of your colleagues to communicate directly with the customers, you probably don't want to make them all Agents.  In turn, you won't be able to assign an issue in a Service Desk project to another Jira user unless that user is an Agent (which consumes one JSD license seat).

What I think you will want to do is have a single project to acquire all the customer requests.  Then you can have at least one other project where you can place a Clone or duplicate of the JSD request.   This is not an ideal solution because when you clone the issue in JSD, it's possible the customer might get a duplicate set of notification until such time that the user is removed form the reporter field (which would have to happen because then you would have to move the issue to the other project).   Perhaps there is a plugin for Jira that might be more helpful in this kind of requested setup.  I'm thinking of possibly Issue SYNC - Synchronization for Jira

While I have not personally used this plugin, I believe it will let you configure specific rules in order to copy specific issue details from one project to another project.  Perhaps something like this can be used in order to help with the kind of setup I think you are looking for here.  You might be able to do this by configuring this kind of plugin to copy the details of the Service Desk issues into a different Software project, that your colleagues then get to work on.   But even this would probably be rather tricky to configure properly.  I am not certain how difficult, but I could conceivably see hours worth of configuration details to avoid possible problems.  

It might be worth exploring the services of a Solution Partner in your country.  These partners specialize in providing services such as configuration, consultation, etc.

Deleted user February 9, 2018

Thank you @Andy Heinzer. Tell me, is it possibile to do the following workflow?

Customer make the issue in JSD (he is the reporter) -> I comment the issue and update the customer -> Then, I will copy the issue in the Kanban project -> In the Kanban project I set me as reporter and my colleagues (for example a designer) as assignee. -> Then, once the issue internally has been completed, I come back in the JSD and update the issue, for example setting as "closed".

What do you think?

The other solution is to not use JSD and let the customer use Jira Software, maybe with a tailored role, but this scenario is a bit tricky in my opinion.

Also, my colleagues from the different areas (ux, design, development) will not have to interact directly with the customer inside the platform. The interaction with customers is possible from PM (me) and Account Managers. So, the so called agents are PM and account managers.

Based on this scenario, what's your "ideal solution"?

Thank you!

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 13, 2018

It is certainly possible to do what you purpose here.  My concern at this point would be to better understand how much work this will end up being for yourself as the person that has to be the go between in order to keep things moving between all parties.

It's difficult for me to know what the ideal solution would be for you here.  You can certainly try to set this up and work with it for a while to learn more about how well this might work for you.

If you find that the setup I have suggested here does not work for you, then perhaps you can work with @francis who has also commented on this thread with another purposed solution. 

Deleted user February 8, 2018

@Andy HeinzerPlease, let me know your thoughts!

francis
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
February 8, 2018

This one of the use cases we use Exalate for (I'm part of the team building this product)

 

We have one service desk project where customers raise tickets.  For each customer, we do have a separate customer project.  This allows us to track work related to that customer, prioritize tasks, invoice and much more. 

 

The support engineer has the option to escalate (that's where the name exalate is coming from) into a customer specific project by triggering a transition.

 

In the transition screen s/he chooses the target project, and with the scripting flexibility of exalate, a corresponding issue is automatically created in the appropriate project.  All relevant information is synchronized between the two issues.

 

The solution is pretty scalable as you only need to add a new customer project to Jira to get it configured.

 

If you would like to have a look how it works - feel free to book a meeting 

https://exalate-demo.youcanbook.me

 

Francis

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