Incorporating Service Desk with an Agile project

Ross Gardner November 13, 2015

HI,

I was hoping someone may be able to suggest an improved workflow as what we currently have is a little messy. 

We have been using JIRA for some years for our small Agile development team of 4 people.  This works very well for us and we work hard to keep the backlog of stories clean, estimated and prioritised.

As we are a small team we don't have a designated support team and have historically just shared out the issues to the most revelent developer as they arrive via email.  We implemented service desk some 6 months ago and struggled to find a way to fit it into our workflow.

If we created the Service Desk implementation on top of our Agile project our well kept backlog quickly became full of user requests that had no place in being there.  As a small development team within a larger business we also have the IT guy task of picking up "standard" IT issues like peoples phones. laptops, printers, etc.. not working.  As you can appreciate we really don't want this stuff in our development backlog.

Therefore we made another project and used this exclusively for Service Desk and this seemed to work well.

The issue we then found was when we were dealing with a request that does need to be transitioned into an item on our backlog we started to loose visibility from a watcher/reporter perspective.

When the issue is in service desk the email notifications work great and keep the reporter in the loop.  As soon as we moved the issue out of Service Desk into our agile project the trail went cold for the reporter.  As items on the backlog can exist for sometime before they become a priority we often forget to update the reporter. Most of our users are mobile and have no way of checking the internal JIRA website.  They are solely reliant upon the email notifications. Due to this the reporter was often unaware of the status of the request and couldn't easily check up.

We played with closing the original ticket in Service Desk informing the user that their issue was closed in relation to the service desk and had been passed to the development team.  Whilst this worked it doesn't seem as slick as it could be.

Any ideas or stories of experiences working with Service Desk promoting tickets to the Agile backlog in another project would be appreciated.

We have actually stopped using Service Desk due to this break down in workflow but I would really like to streamline the process and pick it up again if you have some suggestions.

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James Strangeway
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November 13, 2015

When you say a request does not need to be transitioned into an item on our backlog.... Are you saying it is currently in JIRA as a Help Desk issue, but does not need to be added to your Agile backlog?  If that is the case, have you considered adding a status of "Unapproved" or "Declined" that resolves to "Done"?  

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