Enjoy this previously written blog by myself for a solution partner. It explores how what we now know as JSM came around and where I believed it was going.

When Atlassian first announced their new product Jira Service Desk, it was nothing more than an add on to the platform. Over time, this became its own standalone product. We review how the application has changed since conception and the future of the product.

The history of Jira

Jira Service Desk (JSD), now known as Jira Service Management (JSM), was created by Atlassian after research showed customers using marketplace apps to turn their software projects into a makeshift service desk for internal users. After recognising their power, Atlassian used these apps to create the groundwork of Jira Service Desk as we know it today.

JSD offered familiarity to users. It utilised the power of Jira’s core platform with workflows and custom fields to provide an adaptable, bespoke platform to suit your business’s way of working. Not long after, Pink Elephant verified JSD as having the capability to house the four main processes in ITIL - Incident, Problem, Request and Change Management. JSD also brought native no-code automations to the application for the first time.

JSD provided the opportunity for service desk teams to deflect tickets with a knowledge base. Linking to a Confluence space allowed agents to label Confluence pages with keywords so they would show on the portal as customers were creating their requests. Similarly, agents can respond to tickets with links to these articles to resolve requests quicker by pointing the customer in the right direction.

Following the launch of Atlassian’s new product, marketplace vendors were keen to add to the functionality of JSD with new apps. This lead to the development of some of the best apps available today, such as Insight Asset Management, Proforma for Jira and Deviniti’s Cross Project Queues and Extensions for JSD. Insight gave JSD the ability to offer a fifth common process in the ITIL framework. Proforma added the ability to dynamically adapt your request forms, whilst the Cross Project Queues allowed teams to easily manage multiple projects from a single pane of glass. Alongside these focused apps, Automation for Jira (A4J) became an essential part of any service desk due to the powerful no-code automation abilities. A4J allowed admins to configure rules for almost anything. The most common rules are around automated approvals, creation of scheduled tickets, editing issues or sending webhooks/messages to external applications like Slack or Teams.

Skip forward a few years and Atlassian decide to develop their Cloud platform and acquired several companies to aid this. OpsGenie, an alert and event management application was bought in September 2018, followed by Halp, a ChatOps service desk app in May 2020 and finally, Insights Asset Management in August 2020.

Atlassian first saw the benefits of a combined single application for all their ITSM tools with JiraOps. JiraOps was a half and half measure of OpsGenie and JSD. While this may not have stayed around long, it showed the true benefit of a single service management application that gave the agents a single efficient application to work from while the tools did the leg work behind the scenes.

Jira as we know it

Late last year, Atlassian rebranded JSD as Jira Service Management. They’ve continued to push their Cloud applications and have improved their existing features like the new queue management system,

which allows agents to action tickets right from the queue, and the new issue view, which has created a slicker Jira ticket UI and allows agents to see the most relevant information of an issue without being overwhelmed.

Lastly, as Atlassian are phasing out server platforms, you are no longer able to buy new licences for apps or main products as of February 2021.

A4J has become native functionality within Jira and has continued to develop new actions and integrations. OpsGenie’s features like schedules, services, and major incident management are now available inside JSM.

Insight Asset Management has become integrated and has resulted in an easier setup between Insight and service projects by allowing easier custom field creation and displaying the Insight objects on the linked tickets better. Insight queries are also now part of JQL bringing the whole search under one roof.

Atlassian acquired Thinktilt, the maker of Proforma, in April this year. The dynamic forms and vast library of templates will enable service managers to quickly create and work with requests. Requests forms enable agents to efficiently receive all information required from the customer in order to complete the item of work. Dynamic forms aid the agents in the collection of information for more complex requests while removing the need for additional custom fields. They also keep the request forms clean and guide the customer through the relevant parts.

Atlassian have continued to improve integrations with other products both from Atlassian and third parties. With Confluence, you can now have multiple knowledge bases feeding in to the same service project. This allows different pools of knowledge that may be owned and maintained by multiple teams to service the same users on the same portal. Atlassian have also strengthened the link with GitHub, GitLab and of course Bitbucket. The improved integration provides a more seamless development change process with auto approvals. The development platforms also saw improvements from OpsGenie so that when incidents occur, you can look over your release timeline for the affected service and see what may have caused it. This information, with the inclusion of OpsGenie’s services and major incident management has therefore been rolled into the new JSM projects.

A simple but effective integration is the Halp ChatOps tool which allows Slack messages to be converted into tickets by using emojis. So the next time your colleague Slacks you instead of raising the ticket they should have, either of you can convert the message into a ticket and keep it up to date with comments using a thread. You can even create internal comments for other agents by using a emoji, and finally resolve the ticket with a . While many service managers encourage the use of the portal as it can help with ticket deflection and the collection of vital data, we just cannot get away from those pesky side messages to agents.

Where to next?

Enough of the now, what’s coming up? Let’s review the Atlassian roadmap for JSM.

Changes

A long awaited native change calendar is coming to JSM. Currently, users are reliant on apps like team calendars or the simple issues calendar gadget, which either require additional unnecessary spending or is extremely limited in what it could show. But soon, you will have the ability to properly show and plan changes around each other and change freezes or any other factors that may occur in your business.

Apps

• Proforma’s technology of advanced dynamic form creation will become native to the Cloud platform which will massively improve form capabilities and customer experience when entering and using the portal.

• Halp integration with JSM will continue to add improvements, such as having the ability to use portal forms when creating requests which will ensure users continue to capture all relevant data and can get to solving issues quicker.

• Currently, Insight is just the core platform, and while this is still powerful - especially with the latest addition of .csv file importation and exportation - you will soon have the integrations to Cloud platforms like Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. These integrations and the full migration plan for Insight coming by September 2021 mean the Insight Cloud version will finally be as powerful as its on-premise counterpart.

• Atlassian have also announced they will be continuing to improve the deployment based incident integration with the likes of GitLab and Bamboo.

Approvals

This long awaited feature will give agents the ability to sync approvals to user groups rather than single user fields. This continues to improve overall user management of the application and reduce maintenance of the tool.

Conclusion

Jira Service Management, as expected, is maturing and has come an extremely long way since its conception under JSD. It’s deep standalone integrations along with the acquisitions made by Atlassian show their commitment to the continuous improvement for the platform. It provides more flexibility to adapt to every companies requirements, while providing the best opportunity for new businesses to get started with the verified processes from Pink Elephant. Atlassian are developing features to integrate all of their applications into one view to provide a powerful single pane of glass for agents, with the aim of making it far more efficient by having less context switching between apps. JSM continues to be a strong competitor within the industry and the implementation of the upcoming roadmap will only advance Atlassian’s success.