This week, I have something special for you.
It's the story about how I became a volunteer Jira Service Management admin. What started out as a learning exercise has grown into a full JSM helpdesk setup, all based on the Free version of JSM. 🤑
Now that I've worked with a lot of startups, I want to share my JSM learnings that you can use as you scale your startup. It's a bit longer than my normal content, but I think you'll find it useful!
Let me explain how this all started: When I first joined Atlassian just over five years ago, I was excited to learn all I could about our solutions.
As I was learning about JSM, some lightbulbs started going off in my head. My husband manages IT for a small school, and he has often described having issues managing their IT requests. At the time, he was using an online form for teachers to submit requests, and he worked out of the spreadsheet that the form fed into.
The challengesThere were quite a few problems with this approach:
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When I asked him why he was using doing it this way, he said it was because it was free and he didn’t have time to find something else. I needed to learn JSM anyway, so what better way to learn than to set this up for him myself?
I got to work creating a mockup. The school was not yet sold, but they agreed to take a look at what I built.
We began pretty simply by creating the following in JSM:
We identified the needed fields and workflow states, then determined the order of fields on the screen and what needs to be mandatory vs optional.
Below are the prototypes after just a bit of work! 👇
Customer Portal:
Customer View of Requests:
Agent View:
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Tech Ticket Form:
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Web Access Form:
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With approval granted, we implemented the two issue types and set up the portal. We also set up the email request type so users could submit a ticket via email instead of going to the portal. We iterated on the fields a bit, tweaking the layout and what fields should and shouldn't be mandatory. Then, we rolled it out.
The quick winsIt was an instant success! Here's what they loved right away:
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The school started with JSM in July 2021. Now, just over 3 and a half years later, here’s where it stands:
2021 |
2022 |
2023 |
2024 |
Issue Types: 2 | Issue Types: 5 | Issue Types: 6 | Issue Types: 7 |
Used by: ~75 staff | Used by: ~75 staff | Used by: ~550 staff & students | Used by: ~550 staff & students |
Projects: 1 | Projects: 1 | Projects: 2 | Projects: 2 |
Agents: 1 | Agents: 2 | Agents: 3 | Agents: 3 |
Workflows: 1 | Workflows: 3 | Workflows: 4 | Workflows: 4 |
Tickets: 0 | Tickets: 687 | Tickets: 1,249 | Tickets: 2,047 |
The end resultThis project has been a win on many fronts:
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What really still amazes me, however, is how much more functionality (over the original online form) the school is getting.
So as you scale your startup, I encourage you to consider trying JSM. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much you can get out of the Free version! 💸
Peggy Graham
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