Guidance for using Jira Software for a 3 person Helpdesk team

[Joel Feld]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for a little guidance if anyone has had experience using Jira Software for their everyday Helpdesk support tool.  Our team of 3 support tech's have been directed to use this software as our primary tool to track our goals, and weekly sprints for providing support and as a tool to focus on weekly tasks.

I'm just struggling with how to make this software successful in our environment when our typically days consist of helpdesk phone calls, setting up computers, and mobile devices and end user help.

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

There's a whole world of "Service Management" and it would be very easy to drown in all the information you can find on the web about it, even if you focussed on just the stuff that talked about doing it with Jira.

Jira, at its heart, is an issue tracker, and helpdesk calls can be treated as issues, so it makes sense to adapt Jira to handle calls.  A lot of people do it, and it's so popular, that a few years ago, Atlassian built an entire application to add loads of "service desk" functions over the top of Jira.  I don't know if you might need any of those functions though, when you're small and working closely together, you may not.

For your needs, you should think through what you want out of tracking (reports and how you want to see where things are), and configure Jira to match it.  This doesn't need to be a complex thing, get the team together, and draw up a list of things you broadly want to report on, and a simple process flow (don't try to do things like bpm with different types of process points and decisions etc, you end up having to translate them back down to a simple process flow).  

Usually, an hour with a whiteboard will suffice, ending up with a list of inputs to your process, reports, views and a list of status that issues might go through.  I'd then create a simple project in Jira using one of the template types that's closest to your desired process, modify the workflow to match your process, create or include any fields you need and then create (or update if you used a Scrum template) a Scrum board.

You will probably get it wrong at first.  If you're doing sprints, that implies Scrum, and Scrum explicitly includes "process improvement", so make sure you do that.