Scale Up: How your startup can start small and thrive with JSM

[#1]

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! 

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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 challenges

There were quite a few problems with this approach:

• Tickets were often submitted without all the necessary details. This was one of my favorites:
  • Full text of request: “One of my students can’t log in.”
  • Umm, which student and log into what? 😵‍💫
• The spreadsheet was hard to manage - what’s New vs In-Progress vs Closed?
• There was no easy way to ask the requestor for more details or to test a potential fix.
• Teachers had no visibility to the status of their requests, which led to them not submitting requests at all but instead calling, texting, etc.

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.

Where we started

We began pretty simply by creating the following in JSM:

• One agent
• Two ticket types (already an improvement over just the one form!)

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:

Tech Ticket Form:

Web Access Form:

Prototypes... accepted! 💪

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 wins

It was an instant success! Here's what they loved right away:

• Teachers could submit a ticket and be notified that it was received.
• There was a two-way communication channel, so IT could go back to the requestor for clarification if needed, and teachers received status updates as work progressed.
• IT could easily see what was New and needed to be prioritized vs. what was in progress or already done.

Over time, we iterated (schools can be agile too!):

• We disabled the email submission of tickets.
  • Reason: You can’t enforce mandatory fields in an email, resulting in a lot of back-and-forths.
  • Lesson learned: In the process of doing that, I accidentally disabled ALL email notifications in JSM. Opps! Did I mention that I learned a lot about JSM through this project?
• The school grew, so we added a second agent. And later, a third. Have I mentioned that this is all still with Free JSM?! 🤩
• We added additional issue types, which meant additional fields and workflows
  • Lesson learned: I accidentally broke JSM by making a field mandatory that was not on all issue types! Again, learning!
• We added automation to:
  • Auto-assign tickets, by ticket type, to the right agent.
  • Auto-close tickets after 7 days if the requestor did not confirm that their issue was fixed.
  • Auto-update the status when a comment is added, so the agents know to check the ticket.
• We added students to the portal, going from about 75 staff to over 550 staff and students.
  • This meant implementing a paid Atlassian tool... but that's another story for another day. 😉

So, where are we now?

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 result

This project has been a win on many fronts:

• I learned a lot about JSM by working on this.

• IT at the school has much better visibility to their work.

• Teachers are using the system which also improves visibility because it’s all in one place, vs IT getting requests via chat, form submissions, email, texts, etc.

• There is a way to communicate on issues and have a discussion that gets tracked.

• JSM now basically runs itself and I spend very little time making changes at this point.

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! 💸

Jira Service Management. This is the way.

[Peggy Graham]

Want to hear more about this and talk through how your startup could get more from JSM Free? Join me in startups office hours and let's chat!

[Tapiwa Samkange]

Thanks for this informative article, @Peggy Graham ! Great to see how JSM has a real impact on ITSM service efficiency (with some careful planning sprinkled in). It is incredible that what you shared was achievable with the free version of JSM. 

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Had this article on my 'to-do reading list' for a while and I can just say - thank you for sharing! 🙌

I had a similar experience in my old workplace where I was in charge of customer success/remote support part for our products. As soon as we rolled out JSM the first feedback, which came from one of our customers, was all positive! (sadly, I don't have a quote here with me, but they were impressed for moving from emails to this ticketing system)
That was also a startup and I believe we used JSM on Free plan for quite a while before switching to Standard.