Atlassian University Series - Jira Service Management Fundamentals

[#1]

Welcome to part 4 of this series. This time I am going back to my roots! This time, I have taken a crack at Jira Service Management Fundamentals

You can find the other articles here:

• (Re)Starting University Series
• Jira Fundamentals
• Trello Fundamentals

My first experience with Atlassian products was Jira Service Management. I have set up the environment for my organization, I work with it daily and continue to improve our processes and configuration on a regular basis. I was curious to see if I could learn anything from the fundamentals course that I haven’t learned myself already.

As always, let’s first break down the course itself.

Jira Service Management Fundamentals 

As with all the foundation courses, you are first presented with some basic information that you will need to understand the rest of the course. They also set the boundaries for this course. It is aimed at new service agents. Don’t expect anything about configuring JSM in this course.

They go on to explain what the benefits of JSM are, why you should use it, and which personas are most likely to interact with JSM.

• Agent: The person handling the issues that are created by customers
• Customer: The person entering requests to be handled by an agent
• (Project) Administrator: The person configuring the project. Including workflows, automations and the like.
• Collaborator: A colleague who sometimes chips in with useful information. They don’t need an agent license and can only communicate through internal comments. For example, a developer who is providing detailed insights to help solve the issue at hand

From the start, Atlassian is assuming that customers will be using the Help Center to enter their requests. There is no mention of other channels that customers can use. 

To clear things up; An issue and a request are technically the same single unit of work. However, a request is how that issue is displayed to the customer. An issue might contain additional information that isn’t displayed on the request. Internal notes for example.

Before moving on, you need to know about the basic concepts of JSM. Queues are filtered lists of issues based on certain criteria, Service Project is the collection of issues, requests, and queues to help your team manage and organize work, and Issues (or requests when presented to the customer) are single units of work.

The course gives a good rundown of the ideal situation. A customer enters a request through the Help Center, the issue is assigned to an agent in JSM, the agent first needs to understand the question before communicating with the customer, and the issue is resolved and eventually closed. While most of the information is presented in text, there is a great video that visualizes the previously presented information. 

The course focusses heavily on communicating with the customer. Every action should be communicated, and the issues should always show the latest status. The knowledge base should be filled with useful articles, preferably based on article templates to standardize customer communication. Communication should be kept functional and filler text is best eliminated. All are focused on providing the customer with a fitting solution as soon as possible. Good service starts and ends with communication.

Agents are encouraged to be proactive in improving their JSM use. They are shown how to create dashboards and reports to keep track of their own work, and motivated to share them with colleagues. Creating, and sharing, knowledge base articles (both internal and external) is discussed in detail, and agents are spurred on to be an ambassador and engage with their project administrators to optimize their workflow. 

The last chapter is reserved to optimize JSM for the agent and to make using JSM a daily habit. Using the right notifications, following a daily routine, keeping the personal queue open at all times, using bulk actions, and, of course, using JSM daily, will ensure that agents are up and running in no time.

Conclusion

So, did I learn something new? To be honest, no. I have been using JSM too long to still be considered a new user. I have set up several projects and trained agents in using JSM. 

However, I am going to make this course mandatory course material for our service desk agents. The information is basic, easy to follow, and, quite motivating. The tone of voice is excellent and really inspires agents to take action and improve their way of working.

Even though I didn’t learn anything new, I was reminded of some configurations that still need some attention. Using the correct categories for knowledge base articles, re-thinking our request types, and re-design our Help Center workflow. Also, it reminds me that great service starts with communication. Not only to our customers but also between the agents. They are the ones working with the software on a daily basis and know best how the provided service can be optimized. 

In the end, this was still a good way to spend my time. It never hurts to go back to the basics and to be reminded that what now seems trivial, was not so long ago, completely new and eye-opening.

Results

Due to a misclick, I made one mistake. Unfortunately, it is not possible to return to the previous question to correct this but no problem. I still managed to achieve 95% on the test, enough to pass the test and earn the coveted badge

The questions are straightforward but do require knowledge about the product. You need to know where to find certain functionality and know the basic terminology used throughout the course.

 

https://university.atlassian.com/student/award/32NmRgGhJ77D1UL83hpXtrAM

Signing off

This being the fourth fundamentals course I take, I can only say that all of them are worth taking. Even if you have been using the product for a while, you are ensured to either learn something new, get insights into some processes, or be reminded of improvements that you still need to take.

Thanks for reading and as always, let me know how you did on this course

Kind regards,

Paul

[Ramesh jayawardana]

Hi Paul,

Excellent way to put it in and I agree with you it is always good to refresh the fundamentals of the tool regardless of the experience we have with the product. Even though I'm working with most Atlassian tools like Jira/JSM, Confluence, Bitbucket, Fisheye/Crucible, and Bambo for more than 10 years where I still feel there is a lot that we can adopt from these fundamental and free courses which Atlassian University presents.